Formalizing Informal Learning?

I attended an on-line webinar sponsored by CLO magazine yesterday entitled, “Formalizing Informal Learning." One colleague of mine asked, why would you want to do that and another said/asked, isn’t that akin to organizing spontaneity? And the webinar was less than news worthy to boot. But, all of that aside, there was one interesting factoid I had never seen. Quoted from IDC, Analyze the Future:

“IDC research indicates that knowledge workers spend 15-30% of their time seeking specific information and these searches are successful less than 50% of the time. For the Fortune 500, the cost of the fruitless searches represents between $60 and $85 billion in direct costs and twice that in opportunity costs.”

Who knows how anyone quantifies such things, but the essence of it rings true to me. Informal learning is essential and inevitable and trying to formalize it past a point seems counterproductive and silly. But making it more efficient by providing more specific knowledge repositories and more precise tools to access them makes a lot of sense—and the payoff, in terms of increased productivity, would be enormous. There are practical ways to do that, and I'll get to them soon.

The same presenter also quoted a U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics finding that 70% of workplace learning is informal and only 30% formal. Jay Cross and others quote the percentages as 80%-20%, and I would say in high-tech industries, it is more like 90%-10% informal to formal. But at least everyone seems to be in agreement about one thing--that formal is merely the tip of the workplace learning iceberg, with the vast majority lurking out of sight below the surface.

If anyone has more quotable factoids like the IDC and BLS reports, please share them--thanks!