The True Cost of Finding that Needle of Information
in the Haystack of Data on Your Computer
By Dave Paradi

Every day, individuals spend time trying to find information on their computer. With data being created at ever increasing rates, the volume to search through becomes greater and greater. This causes the search times to grow longer and longer. Information workers spend time finding important customer e-mails in the sea of e-mail that they receive, finding key files on shared drives holding thousands of files, finding the right information in long documents and finding relevant information on the World Wide Web. This delay in locating information reduces productivity, delays crucial decisions and increases the chance that work will be done twice because the previous work cannot be located in a timely manner.

And the costs are staggering. Research firm IDC suggests that an organization with 100 information workers who spend half an hour a day searching for electronic information spends $7,200 per week searching or $375,000 per year. Many technical solutions have been created to better organize data, but according to research by Dr. Irene Grief at Lotus Research, better organizing or classifying the information does not really solve the problem. As Ferris Research reports in the area of e-mail, setting up folders to classify e-mail does not solve the problem because most people don’t have the time to move the huge volume of e-mail into all the categories and end up leaving it all in their inbox.

If you add the costs of re-creating documents that cannot be found and the cost of delays in decisions to the cost of searching, it is easy to estimate that for every 100 information workers an organization has, they could be wasting over $500,000 every year!

Why does this happen? For a number of reasons certainly, but one of the primary reasons is that most people do not use the search tools that are already available to them. Either they are not aware of the search tools, or they do not understand how to use them to find the information they need. Powerful search tools exist in the Windows operating system, Office applications such as Word and Excel, document applications such as Adobe Acrobat and e-mail applications such as Outlook. Many search tools exist on the World Wide Web, but many are not used well, resulting in frustrating results to searches.

The solution is not to invest in more technology. The solution is to leverage the tools that already exist on the desktop of most information workers. Proper training on how to use the tools and strategies for effective usage can save literally hundreds of thousands of dollars each year by increasing worker productivity.

By using what we have already invested in more wisely, we can increase efficiency and reduce the cost of finding the information we need.

©MMIII Dave Paradi

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