So Much Knowledge, So Hard to Find

A couple of more informal learning factoids came to my attention this week. One major tech company I work with estimates that "E-mail 'noise' results in $60M productivity loss" annually. As an example of people's desperate need to transfer knowledge within organizations, this same company says they have over 60,000 email aliases in their email system and sales people subscribe to 30-60 on average. Holy smokes! Imagine the hit to sales productivity if sales people are spending that amount of time managing their email to try to keep current with the knowledge they need to do their jobs.

In a study conducted by BAE Systems, they estimate that 80% of employees waste on average 30 minutes per day retrieving information. That's over two full work weeks each year per person. At a very conservative $30/hour salary for a typical knowledge worker (burdened cost is much higher), that would equate to a $13,500,000 cost per year for a 5,000 person company. That ain't peanuts, and it's probably a significant underestimation if we reflect on the previously cited IDC study. Again, IDC estimates that knowledge workers "spend 15-30% of their time seeking specific information and these searches are successful less than 50% of the time." That equates to at least 45 minutes per day of wasted time per person desperately seeking needed information unsuccessfully. If IDC is correct, that would raise the cost for the 5,000 person company to $20M a year. Either way, the opportunity for improvement in increasing the efficiency of the average worker's and knowledge search and retrieval process is enormous. And just think what the real cost is if we consider the productivity impact is of people not being able to find what they need to know 50% of the time! That number would really be scary...

Part of the explanation for this is "Over 80% of a corporation's business critical information is locked in unstructured formats," according to a recent estimate by Forrester Research. No wonder people are having a hard time finding what they need--the important stuff isn't even available in a readily accessible format! So, the real challenges for us in the learning business are twofold: 1) how to make a company's "business critical information" (their corporate IP) available in an accessible format, and 2) how to increase the efficiency of the search and retrieval process. Making progress on those two fronts will be a significant step forward for workplace learning.