I was reading ComputerWorld this weekend and there was an article titled: How Did I Miss That?, that caught my attention. In the past, I've mentioned issues about attention management and information overload. This article was an interview with Max Bazerman who has done some work on why it actually happens.
There is a paper that he and Doally Chugh wrote titled Bounded Awareness: What You Fail to See Can Hurt You, that goes into more detail.
Bounded awareness is when we fail to see information in our environment because we are overly focused on some other segment of what's out there. The information is readily available, but we don't recognize it's meaning. Attention management may be one method of overcoming this. Agentry and business rules would likely be another. Computers need to focus on the normal operations and identify anomalies outside their domain and notify people so they can focus their attention and address the situation.
This would be a shift from a man-machine interface to a machine-man interface. Making the computer more context aware. In this case, the context is both that of the enterprise as well as the user, and the machine alerts the people about areas to focus their attention (or awareness).
