numbers to represent “the problem”

Finally! I spent a few hours in the business school library yesterday looking for citations that would allow me to put numbers to costs associated with time spent looking for (and not finding) information one needs. I think I’ve finally stumbled onto something I can use! I have had a really difficult time finding academic papers that report numbers on how much time knowledge workers spend looking for information. I guess this kind of survey isn’t sexy or theoretical enough for an academic researcher to spend time and research money collecting the data? So, I thought I would look around in reports by consulting firms, but I didn’t know where to start looking. It turns out that the two reports I found that will be most useful, are freely available on the web — but I would not have known they existed if I hadn’t spent the time in the business school library figuring out what kinds of reports the information I needed might be part of, and what kind of terminology to search for.

Managers Say the Majority of Information Obtained for Their Work Is Useless (Jan 4, 2007, Accenture)

“Managers spend up to two hours a day searching for information, and more than 50 percent of the information they obtain has no value to them. Nearly three out of five respondents (59 percent) said that as a consequence of poor information distribution, they miss information that might be valuable to their jobs almost every day because it exists somewhere else in the company and they just can not find it. In addition, 42 percent of respondents said they accidentally use the wrong information at least once a week, and 53 percent said that less than half of the information they receive is valuable. 36 percent said there is so much information available that it takes a long time to actually find the right piece of data.”

How Executives Stay Informed: A Study of Resources Used and Time Spent Locating Critical Business Information (Nov 4, 2005, Bersin & Associates)

37% of executives spend more than 4 hours per week searching for information; 36% reported spending 2-4 hours. “Considering the typical salary of a top executive, this translates into $1,000 or more per week in time lost through information searches, to say nothing of the cost of not spending this time running their operations. This estimated figure does not include costs associated with lost opportunities, delayed decisions, or other business impacts.”