Firms ‘squander’ 10% of salaries

Key staff fritter away a quarter of their day trying to find the information they need to do their jobs, according to a Butler Group report.

Companies are throwing away 10% of their salary costs by failing to put in place search and delivery strategies for information-dependent workers.
Their neglect also damages their competitiveness and lays firms open to compliance issues.

“Employees are suffering from both information overload and information underload,” says Richard Edwards, senior research analyst at Butler Group.

The “Enterprise Search and Retrieval” report predicts a shake-up in the market, as business intelligence suppliers join forces with search firms such as Autonomy, Fast, IBM and Google, uniting the separate worlds of structured and unstructured information.

“Google’s move into the corporate market with the Google Search Appliance has redefined the technology landscape. Within two years, we could finally see Google as much at home in the enterprise as it is on the web,” says Edwards.