Another Stab at the Cost of Finding Documents
January 12, 2010
Some folks watch a few professionals flounder when looking for information. Others guesstimate how much time is required to locate a needed document. Fresh Business Thinking quotes a wizard, offering factoids like:
SMEs spend approx. 3 months a year looking for documents. (SME is a small-sized or mid-sized organization)
87% of respondents spend up to 2 hours every day looking for documents (on average, one hour of a person’s time is worth £86.61 so that’s £173.22 per person per day wasted across the UK!) (This is the easy route to a cost estimate and probably not a number to take to the bank.)
93% of people surveyed think they waste time looking for documents every day (I want to meet the other seven percent and find out their methods)
On average 46.93% of documents handled by SMEs are still paper based which is incredibly dangerous should there be a fire or flood. (Paper equals danger. I prefer “risk”)
I don’t doubt these figures, but it would have been helpful to get a bit more information about the size of the sample.
That thought these figures triggered was, “No wonder there is such high dissatisfaction with enterprise search systems.” If I spent 25 percent of my time hunting, I would have less time for thinking. We had to locate a single file last used in 1998. It took 30 minutes, which included snarfing through storages devices that had to be reconnected. Search systems have to meet business user needs. The goslings and I are lucky, we have the pick of the litter when it comes to search systems. In fact, that is the secret—multiple tools indexing the same corpus. You would be surprised to compare the difference in search results across systems, each indexing the same corpus. I know I was when I discovered this a decade ago.
But most organizations, or at least those in this sample, could not find the sand in the Mojave Desert. Are the vendors at fault? The procurement teams? The individual users? My thought is that each group shares responsibility for the waste that finding imposes on organizations and individual users of search systems.
Change in 2010? Nope.
Stephen E Arnold, January 12, 2010
I disclose to the General Services Administration’s purchasing group that I was not paid to write this article.
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3 Responses to “Another Stab at the Cost of Finding Documents”
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And that’s just the paper documents. Then add in the cost of the time wasted by inefficient employees looking for informational documents online (documents which are public, and not the organisations) via search-engines…
These research seem to come up every few year and the results almost seemed predictable.
Couldn’t agree with you more in that this is really a problem caused be the combination of software technology, search system implementaiton, organisational culture and the users themselves.
For my money, the easiest fix is actually better awareness of search technology, and improved skillset by the users.
(réflexion) > Des chiffres sur l’information?…
S’il n’est pas facile de dire ce que coûte une information en soi, il est par contre plus simple de se faire une idée du temps consacré par une PME à la recherche d’information.Une PME consacre 3 mois par an à la recherche d’information87% des gens…