London, 7 April 2008 – Many of London’s largest firms are riddled with information graveyards that frustrate employees who are used to the simplicity of internet searches at home, new research from Sinequa revealed today.
Primitive corporate information search capabilities mean many employees are hampered each day in their efforts to deliver work effectively. In a London study undertaken for Sinequa, more than half (59 per cent) of workers questioned said the tools their employers provided for searching their own information systems were either poor or very poor. One in three said that there was no best practice for sharing information available, making searching for information ‘time consuming and frustrating.’ A further 46 per cent said that information searches within their organisation were ‘generic and not comprehensive.’
The research study found that overwhelmingly the capital’s businesses have a Stone Age approach to knowledge management, relying on tools such as email and shared servers to carry out information sharing functions. And despite 88 per cent of companies investing in an intranet, none were looking at how they could leverage the information contained on the intranet to drive efficiencies in operational performance. Just 8 per cent of companies have a dedicated tool that allows staff to search information across the enterprise using key search terms.
Colin Hadden, Country Manager, Sinequa commented: “Employees are struggling to find even basic information, which impacts their productivity on a day-to-day basis and you can’t help but conclude that businesses are seriously missing a trick. The likes of Google and Yahoo! mean that employees au fait with using search tools in order to search, access and connect with huge volumes of data to make informed purchasing decisions or plan a holiday etc in their personal lives. However, at present a large void exists between what they can do as consumers and what they can do as employees. This gap causes employee frustration, limits the value of corporate information and ultimately impacts business success.”
In the past month alone 46 per cent said that they could count up to ten occasions when not having access to the right information had impaired their performance. 16 per cent could recall ten or more times when this had happened. It’s perhaps unsurprising therefore that 40 per cent say finding the information to support the development of a business critical document takes two to three hours on average, with a quarter stating it could take three hours or more.
The vast majority of individuals felt that company knowledge and expertise resides within people’s heads rather than being documented and accessible to all. The research carried out amongst 200 workers in March 2008, found that 77 per cent of employee’s felt that they and their company would benefit from being to search and access relevant information in a timely manner from across the business. Key benefits that respondents outlined included increased productivity (42 per cent), the ability to make more autonomous decisions (51 per cent) and gain more insight into the business (24 per cent).
Hadden continued: “During turbulent times companies need to ensure that they are streamlined and effective – and at the moment the research suggests they aren’t. These statistics provide a glimpse of how much this problem is costing business today. If this issue is framed in terms of lost-man hours, lost opportunity and employee dissatisfaction, its something that needs much more focus at the top level within a business. Giving employee’s intuitive access to information and knowledge is critical to sustaining business productivity. The primitive approaches prevalent in the capital fall well short of what corporate search technology can now deliver.”
