The New York Times > Business > Your Money > Techno Files: Humans vs. Computers, Again. But There's Help for Our Side.

The New York Times > Business > Your Money > Techno Files: Humans vs. Computers, Again. But There's Help for Our Side.: "A current race for a solution goes by the deceptively blah name of 'knowledge management,' or K.M. It is an effort to bring Google-like clarity to the swamp of data on each person's machine or network, and it is based on the underappreciated tension between a computer's capacity and a person's. Modern computers 'scale' well, as the technologists say - that is, the amount of information they can receive, display and store goes up almost without limit. Human beings don't scale. They have finite amounts of time, attention and, even when they're younger than the doddering baby boomers, short-term memory. The more e-mail, Web links and attached files lodged in their computer systems, the harder it can be for people to find what they really want. "