Approaches and Tools for Addressing the Attention Challenge in the Knowledge Economy

Modern working environments increasingly involve rich, diverse, changing and creative activities in which information processing plays a central role. Attention management (i.e. management and allocation of cognitive resources) has become the critical factor in personal and orga nizational development and learning in modern educational and working environments. In this context, information and communication technologies capable of supporting users and organizations in the selection of effective short-term and long-term allocation of cognitive resources have an enormous potential. This paper reviews the most promising available approaches and technologies to support human and organizational attention and suggests avenues for future research. Introduction: Towards the support of Attention in the “Attention Economy” “We live in an age of information overload, where attention has become the most valuable business currency” Thomas H. Davenport and John C. Beck, the Attention Economy The advent of the knowledge-based economy has radically transformed the nature of work and business in organizations. Employees, who once used to fulfill only relatively routine tasks in stable environments, have now transformed into autonomous knowledge workers who are engaged into rich, diverse, changing and creative activities in which the processing of information is the central part of their work. Old economy’s companies, which used to operate in a relatively stable situations centered on the production of large quantities of relatively small variety of goods, have now mutated into learning organizations [1,2] operating in a continuously changing world focused on the furnishing of a large diversity of services highly customized to the needs of a multitude of customers. The main factor of success of old economy companies, the optimization of few processes, has been replaced today by new ones such as the ability to rapidly adapt to open, complex, and ever changing environments and the capacity to deal with a quantity of information of all sorts. “Best in class” organizations have even developed the ability to discover [3], to