The Costs of Poorly Stored Information

Network World write up a good piece regarding just how much companies lose from lost information.

“A company that employs 1,000 information workers can expect more than $5 million in annual salary costs to go down the drain because of the time wasted looking for information and not finding it, IDC research found last year.”

The findings are that information workers can spend as much as 3.5 hours a week searching for lost or misplaced data- over $5,000 per worker!

While information comes in all sorts, chances are, the majority of it is stored within your policies, procedures, and other business critical documents. With a P&P software, all your electronic information is stored in an easy to use format. Search and retrieval times are drastically cut. A personalize portal can store, and be searched, by each of your employees- so they do not have to sift through oceans of information that does not apply them or their job.

And this entire time savings says nothing about the other advantages you get by implementing a P&P software: increased efficiency through automated document flow, viewable compliance metrics on all your business documents, and the ability to store and report on any electronic information.

So why are so many companies behind the curve in implementing cloud based information software- such as a P&P management software?

“They’ve never invested a whole lot in it,” says Matthew Brown, a senior analyst at Forrester Research. “Companies will spend lots and lots of money on architecting portal systems, intranets, dashboards and databases and everything else. Search, typically, for internal applications, companies don’t spend a lot of time on it.”