Hello!

For nearly five years, I've been working on a special project that I believe has the potential to help thousands of people around the World - a solution to one of the defining problems of our age.

Having studied Engineering, then Information Management, I began to notice how the principles of the first could be applied to the other.

My major problem I had with Information Management was that it seemed to view information as some kind of magical substance. You didn't know exactly what the information was or why it was valuable - that was for the user to worry about. All you worried about was storing it and making sure the user could access it quickly.

It is kind of like organising a warehouse - you have all these boxes with stuff inside them, and all you are worried about is storing them on the right shelf, and then moving them about when needed. You don't really care the value of the thing inside the box - it could be a £5,000 TV or an £80 flat-pack wardrobe.

Engineering, on the other hand, does concern itself with value (e.g. what's in the box, and what you can do with it). You take a few pieces of wood, worth £25, then cut them up and stick them together in a certain way. If you've done your job well, you've created a table worth £300.

Since it is was not an accident that you had something that was worth £25 and now have something that is worth £300, it is clear that there is something systematic going on here.

Engineering uses a set of processes - cutting, welding, painting, etc - which each change the value in some way. (Note: I say "change" rather than the commonly used phrase "add" value, because cutting a table in two makes it less valuable to most people, yet more valuable to someone who is looking to buy a couple of table-halves.)

Infogineering takes this same idea of using value-changing processes and applies it to information. The "Infogineering Processes" include simplification, customisation, layered complexity, colour, and several more. Applying these processes to a piece of information - say a document, e-mail, presentation - hopefully makes them better than they were before for the end user.

In short, rather than managing the information in our lives, I felt there should be more focus on engineering the information to actually make it better. Infogineering aims to do just that - offer a structured approach to help people make their information better.

Why Infogineering... and why now?

As I'll discuss in a future post, we've recently passed a tipping point in our civilisation when information has gone from being a rare prized possession, to something that is actively working against us. We never really had to learn how to deal with it when it was scarce, and now that inability to understand and process it is catching up with us... big time.

Being overloaded with information has many serious consequences. These range from loss of money in a business, to more stress and less time in our private lives.

The flip-side of this is that the people that do learn to deal with information will not only be less stressed and have more free time, but they'll have a competitive advantage over those that don't. Meanwhile, companies that put in place value-based information strategies will shoot ahead in the marketplace. In short, they'll survive and thrive in the age of information overload.

Once I realised that I had a system that could really help people address these problems, I turned my attention to bringing it to the masses... and the Web was the perfect place to publish my ideas. Through this site, I plan to do just that.

As they say, all good ideas have a good time. Too early, or too late and they just don't take off. I hope Infogineering has come along at the right time.

What's to come on the site?

Infogineering.net is a work in progress, as is the Infogineering system. I've only published part of the whole Infogineering system as it currently stands. I'll be adding more to the site frequently, and also refining what is already there.

Over time, there will be stuff to download, listen to, watch, and buy.

I've been advised to watch out for suddenly being hit with an avalanche of traffic at one point, so I've had to take steps to prevent being overrun. It would be rather ironic if Infogineering - a system that is designed to help people cope with information overload - was itself killed by overload.

I've limited contact on the site to the "Ask Neil" section for now. I've done sites in the past where I have encouraged people to e-mail me, and the result was I spent the majority of my time either dealing with people trying to get me to advertise their products, or acting as a free consultant for people who couldn't be bothered to learn how to use Google :) The Ask Neil section allows me to see what general issues people want me to address - and I'll either answer the question directly, or make sure the content is there on the site.

I'm also aware that, by creating rules and a system, people are going to turn around and apply these to my own work. Occasionally, I may slip a bit - so forgive me if I accidently put twelve words in bold once or twice.

At the bottom of each article is a box with links to related articles, but also a couple of other tabs for social bookmarking and adding links on your own sites. I'll be keeping an eye on these other sites to see how many people are linking to each article. This will allow me to produce more of the stuff you want.

If you haven't already done so, please join the mailing list. Don't worry - I'm not going to contribute to your information overload problems by bombarding you with e-mails every day, but I will send you quality information that should make your life better/easier in some way. There will be an unsubscribe link in every e-mail, so you can stop getting them at anytime.

So, thanks for visiting the site... and I hope you enjoy watching the developments to come!

Neil