Access to information remains one of the biggest concerns to information workers. And we also here that information workers spend as much as 20% of their time trying to find information.

The cost of not responding to the avalanche of information can add up, yet not be immediately visible to CEOs and CFOs. In surveys of U.S. companies, we have found that information workers spend 14.5 hours per week reading and answering email, 13.3 hours creating documents, 9.6 hours searching for information, and 9.5 hours analyzing information. Expanding Digital Universe (IDC)

Search is often seen as the solution to reducing the amount of time spent searching for information. This may be true, but it presumes that the information worker would be able to access the information they need. If access is not available, the workers instead must rely on their network and spend their time working on finding out who has the information.

Something along the lines of:

"OK, so I need to get the share numbers for product X in market Y"

1) Do I have those?

"Let me check my hard drive. Hmm. No"

2) Where else could the be?

"Let me check my various search applications. Hmm. No"

So lets say that was 10 minutes. 

3) Who could I ask?

"I know let me send out emails to my friends"

So of course now the network are completing steps (1) and (2), until someone responds to say they found something, netting 10 minutes used by each member of the network until something is found. The harder to find, the more it costs. And when it is not found, which surveys put at around 50% of the time, it costs the most.

So I think there are two problems that need to be solved. Firstly, the information has to be available, and in a form that can be consumed and recognized by the person that needs it - to reduce the number of times we fail to find what we are looking for. Second, there should really be fast an efficient ways to search for what is available - to reduce the time we spend, especially distributed across our contact networks looking for it.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 18th, 2008 at 12:32 pm and is filed under Modern Workplace. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.