Towards detecting and managing information anxiety in the ICT industry

Abstract

Information Anxiety is defined as "stress caused by the inability to access, understand, or make use of information necessary for employees to do their job". Even though it is in itself an intangible phenomenon, it is widely acknowledged and has been linked to impaired decision-making ability, information withdrawal, information avoidance, burnout and other health issues. The ICT industry is acknowledged to be a fully fledged knowledge industry. That is to say that its workers are mainly tasked with creating, understanding, applying and distributing knowledge as part of their day-to-day job. The industry is also characterised by disruptive innovations, continuously changing technologies and customers who constantly change their mind about what they want systems to do. In this paper, we present the results of a study which tracked 18 participants for a period of one month in order to investigate the presence of information anxiety in the Maltese ICT industry. Our results indicate that information anxiety is present in nontrivial levels amongst our cohort of participants, with information overload being the predominant cause. Also, participants working in a quality assurance (QA) function are more exposed to the phenomenon as well as being exposed to a wider variety of sources of anxiety than developers. Experience is also shown to be a factor with participants being less prone to symptoms of information overload as they gain more experience in the field.