The high cost of not finding information: Reinventing is more fun than reusing

The high cost of not finding information by Susan Feldman (via Michael Fioritto):

• examples of information disasters (how things went wrong because of information not found)
• reasons for these disasters

• information is scattered between multiple sources (think of your own e-mail, local drive, paper archive, bookmarks, weblog + all systems of your company that you use + Internet + who knows what)
• everyone does search, but not everyone has skills to do it well
• there is too much information (but think of: every signal starts out as noise)

• success of searches

• knowledge workers spend 15-35% of their time searching
• only 50% searches are successful
• 40% corporate users can’t find information they need to do their job on their intranets

• easy access through a single interface
• need to understand what is there, so they know what they don’t know
• information seamlessly embedded into work

A quote:

Recent research on knowledge work shows that knowledge workers spend more time recreating existing information than they do turning out information that does not already exist. Some studies suggest that 90% of the time that knowledge workers spend in creating new reports or other products is spent in recreating information that already exists. In 1999, a European study by IDC examined that phenomenon, called the “knowledge work deficit,” and concluded that the cost of intellectual rework, substandard performance and inability to find knowledge resources was $5,000 per worker per year.

Just a small thing to add: in many cases the reason for not finding information is not about search problems, but about not searching at all. For me it’s not about bad search, it’s about human nature: for people reinventing is more fun than reusing even if their organisations lose money (hope to post a paper with some data to support it soon :)

See also: Knowledge workers time spent finding information, Why people do not ask questions? (1) and (2), Personal ways of doing things in public

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/04/20.html#a1169; comments are here.

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Tagged as: asking questions, knowledge mapping