Employee productivity: 21 critical minutes by Gilles ANDRE.
From the post:
Twenty-one minutes a day. That’s how long employees spend each day searching for information they know exists but is hard to find. These 21 minutes cost their company the equivalent of €1,500 per year per employee. That’s an average of two whole working weeks. This particular Mindjet study is, of course, somewhat anecdotal and some research firms such as IDC put the figure as high as €10,000 per year. These findings signal a new challenge facing businesses: employees know that the information is there, but they cannot find it. This stalemate can become extremely costly and, in some cases, can even kill off a business. Are companies really aware of this problem?
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So far, companies have responded to this rising tide of data by spending money. They have invested large, even enormous sums in solutions to store, secure and access their information – one of the key assets of their business. They have also invested heavily in a range of different applications to meet their operational needs. Yet these same applications have created vast information silos spanning their entire organisation. Interdepartmental communication is stifled and information travels like vehicles on the M25 during rush hour.
The link to Mindjet is to their corporate website and not to the study. Ironically I did search at the Mindjet site, the solution Polyspot suggests and came up empty for “21 minutes.” You would think that would be in the report somewhere as a string.
I suspect 21 minutes would be on the low side of lost employee productivity on a daily basis.
But it isn’t hard to discover why businesses have failed to address that loss in employee productivity.
Take out the latest annual report for your business with a line item budget in it. Examine it carefully and then answer the following question:
At what line item is lost employee productivity reported?
Now imagine that your CIO proposes to make information once found, found for all employees. A mixture of a search engine, indexing, topic map, with a process to keep it updated.
You don’t know the exact figures but do you think there would be a line item in the budget from such a project?
And, would there be metrics to determine if the project succeeded or failed?
Ah, so, if the business continues to lose employee productivity there is no metric for success or failure and it never shows up as a line item in the budget.
That is the safe position.
At least until the business collapses and/or is overtaken by other companies.
If you are interested in over taking no-line-item (nli) companies consider evolving search applications that incorporate topic maps.
Topic maps: Information once found, stays found.