Enterprise Software Could Learn a Lot from Marketers.
One thing enterprise software still hasn’t figured out? More information is not always better.
There’s a logical fallacy at play—the idea that bombarding knowledge workers with more data, more alerts, and more documentation somehow makes them more effective. But in reality, it does the opposite.
This is especially true for SREs, who get slammed with:
📩 Chain emails full of irrelevant noise.
🔔 Automated notifications (even when nothing is actually wrong).
📑 Unbalanced documentation policies that either over-document or under-document critical infrastructure.
The result? Massive cognitive debt. The very systems meant to enhance communication become liabilities—clogged with so much untargeted, low-value information that signal gets lost in the noise.
Bad inputs do not become good judgment
You Can’t Fix Bad Data With More Bad Data.
Some companies think AI-driven reasoning can solve this—just throw more unstructured data at a machine and let it figure things out. But that’s not a solution. Machines struggle with the same thing humans do: bad inputs lead to bad outputs.
The Better Approach? Treat Humans as Cognitive Resources
Humans make about 32,000 non-survival-related decisions per day. The goal shouldn’t be to overload them—it should be to leverage their cognitive bandwidth with:
- ✅ Targeted information delivery.
- ✅ Intelligent, responsible automation.
- ✅ Systems that optimize decision-making, rather than flood it.
Curate the cognitive pipeline
Think Like a Marketer.
Marketers figured this out a long time ago. They don’t dump every possible ad in front of every possible person.
I mean, obviously, they can—and will gladly take your money if that’s what you want. But smart marketers know advertising is far more effective when it’s concise, targeted, and aligned with what the audience actually cares about.
They curate, time, and personalize their messages for maximum engagement. Then, they use sneaky psychology and engagement tricks to keep you clicking.
Enterprise software should do the same. Instead of drowning knowledge workers in noise, companies need to deliver the right information, to the right people, at the right time—and use psychology, paired with positive incentives to keep workflows moving efficiently.
Because engaged knowledge workers are productive knowledge workers.
And right now? Most major corporations (and thousands of smaller ones) are failing at this.
What do you think? How does your organization think about its cognitive pipeline?