Social Tagging Saves IBM $4.6 Million

I read a blog post on IBM developerWorks about how social tagging saved the company $millions. As background:

"The Enterprise Tagging Service in IBM aims to provide an alternative approach to helping people find information compared to traditional search engines... Social tagging allows people to add human semantics to keywords that they define that sometimes can amount to finding a resource faster based on what people think is relevant...IBM’s ETS cost $700k to develop and deploy across the worldwide intranet as a sidebar to a number of key web properties... Readers can tag any page with the widget, look up tags they contributed, find others who have used the same tag, and certainly find other relevant resources by that same tag."

And here's the best part:
"The ETS team instituted a survey to ask users how this tool helped them. What they found was amazing when you look at it in context: the average person saved 12 seconds, across the 286000+ searches performed through ETS each week. This sums up to 955 hours saved each week across the company. In terms of cost savings, it amounts to a rough estimate of $4.6 million a year, in terms of productivity gain."

It's great to see companies like IBM adopt tagging and other social media approaches to increase productivity--it shows that there is indeed hope that the enterprise will catch on! But, what is surprising is that they are so pleased with a 12 second improvement in searching--since the problem and opportunity is so much bigger than that. Remember from previous posts in this blog:

“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.”

If we assume 20% as the average time people spend looking for info, that equates to one entire work day per week, or a whopping 10 weeks per person per year. That single 8-hour day multiplies out to 28,800 seconds per day, compared to the 12 seconds saved per search. If we assume that people on average make 20 searches today (I'm making this up, but it seems reasonable), each person would save a total of 4 entire minutes per day, or 20 minutes per week--which is 4.2% of the total time searching! I'm all for social tagging and I agree we should all include it in our arsenal--but it is clearly a very weak weapon to help us win the productivity war.

But, imagine if you could search knowledge down to the spoken word, access it at the exact point of interest, and have it all available in your favorite digital media formats (streaming, downloadable, mobile). And then imagine, after finding a knowledge nugget of interest, you could find the expert/author, see all of that person's work, ask the person a salient question, follow the person's future contributions, and be able to find, join and participate in the same communities of interest! Now that is a huge improvement--and that is the power of Collaborative Knoweldge Sharing.