The goal of any company is to make profit. The reason for making a big company is to benefit from economies of scale, that is, to take advantage of the fact that a task done for one person might be cheaper per person if done for more than one. It also allows for specialization, which means people can do the thing they are best at, and we gain efficiency. This is basic economics.

An important factor in the efficiency of a company is communications: Who needs to know what, and when. People need the right information to get their jobs done. And a company full of specialists need a lot of communication, to coordinate their activities, and keep everyone on the same page.

In my time in commercial enterprises, one thing has been made clear: Information overload is a big factor in peoples lives. Perversely, it causes information underflow: people who can't take any more shut out everything. After you spend a few months trying to keep up with everything, and then get a note from your boss asking why everything is taking you so long, you try and filter, but eventually it's too much.

A big problem is the writing skills of the people involved, but part of the problem is the information streams are a firehose. Even with the most obvious things filtered out, there's still a ton to look at, and if you are on a lot of projects, you have to context switch so much that confusion is a common occurance.

One of my goals is to investigate ways to cause people to naturally filter the information they send out, by making it very easy to tag it or otherwise categorize it. With this in mind, it becomes possibles to make tools which help.