Large UK companies waste more than £2.6m a year each as staff
search fruitlessly for information they need to do their jobs,
according to a survey.
The survey of 170 CIOs and IT directors at UK companies with
more than 1,000 staff found that most staff spend more than half a
day per week searching for information, often without finding it.
This costs each firm more than £50,000 a week, the researchers
said.
The statistics worsen when it comes to searching for non-text
data, such as still and video images, drawings audio files, and
even Twitter tweets, said Simon Price, European director of search
software and information risk specialist
Recommind, which
commissioned the study. "That's going to be the next big thing," he
said, adding thatthis is an area of "active investigation" for
Recommind.
Price said there was a growing disconnect between IT departments
and users on search engines. "Consumer search engines such as
Google just are not up to the sophisticated search requirements of
knowledge workers," he said, "and some commercial engines take too
long to tailor and train to be useful to an organisation."
The survey found virtually all firms want their staff to be able
to find documents, spreadsheets and presentations, and 82% want
them to be able to find e-mails. But one in five cannot find
documents easily and three in 10 cannot find e-mails.
The situation worsened when staff had to search for people with
expertise or information associated with a project, for example,
Price said.
Searches outside the organisation were also hampered in many
cases, he said. "Just 34% let their staff do external searches, but
70% said they needed to. Nearly 80% say staff should be able to get
back all information on a project, but only half make it possible,"
he said.
Duncan Ogilvy, knowledge manager for
Mills & Reeve, acommercial law firm and a Recommind user,
said his firm's use was mainly to search internal documents for all
information that related to cases and deals, but it also searched
for expertise.
"Knowing quickly who is the person to gotoon a subject can help
us save clients a lot of time and money. That is useful when they
can see what we are doing every six minutes (which is a billing
period)," he said.
He said the software had not done away with the firm's
librarians. "In fact all the staff are doing upgraded work instead
of searching," he said. "The librarians are doing business research
and the lawyers are doing higher value work."