-More than one working week a year wasted searching for shared

documents

http://www.objective.com/news-and-events/archive/2005/more-than-one-
working-week-a-year-wasted-searching-for-shared-documents

Survey reveals that an unfortunate 23 per cent of us spend a staggering three and a half weeks looking for lost
information each year

A survey of 250 professionals, conducted on behalf of Objective Corporation, has revealed that a significant amount of time

is being wasted every year searching for documents that have not been saved on shared servers or in an appropriate folder.

A lack of internal processes when it comes to the management of documents has led to:

 41% of respondents spend 10 minutes every day looking for documents

 37% of respondents spend half an hour or more looking for documents

Gary Fisher, CEO Europe, Objective Corporation, said: “Not only is this extremely frustrating for staff and management

alike, it is also a significant waste of time that could be better spent on activities that generate profit or improve services.”

“Organisations need to have clearly defined processes in place to ensure effective management of critical documents.

Content management solutions can help enforce those processes that make categorisation and retrieval of all information

types easier for staff. However, the problem needs to be recognised and the processes agreed as a priority,” he concludes.

Documents saved onto desktops and documents being saved in the wrong place, were the two main reasons highlighted by

the survey as causing the problem.

When asked if they could not access a document because it was saved on an individuals desktop:

 5% said ‘All the time’

 20% said ‘Frequently’

 20% said ‘Regularly’

 31% said “Now and Again’

 When asked if they could not access a document because it was saved in the wrong place the survey found:

 8% said ‘All the time’

 25% said ‘Frequently’

 15% said ‘Regularly’

 36% said “Now and Again’

However, it seems that workers are not helping themselves with 21 per cent admitting they only save documents onto

shared servers ‘when I have to’. A further 3 per cent admitted they never saved documents onto a shared server.

In the 21st century no organisation can afford to lose any percentage of its intellectual capital, whether that is in the climate

of a regulatory regime, in the face of increased competition or in the provision of customer service standards that are

necessary to differentiate in their respective markets.

Evidence for the cost-effectiveness of document management software

A report from research company The Gartner Group found that on average each worker spends
around eight hours per week of 'wasted time' dealing with documents. This time is broken down
in the following ways:

• An hour is spent looking for documents

• 1.5 hours are wasted trying to re-purpose or manipulate document content
• An hour is spent struggling with documents which are hard to update
• Another hour is spent trying to share documents
• 30 minutes are spent trying to publish documents consistently
• Another hour is wasted because document creation/review is done on an ad hoc basis
• 30 minutes are spent because it is not immediately obvious which documents are important and
which are not
• Distributing, copying, filing and printing takes at least one hour per week
• Archiving which is inefficient takes another hour

Bearing in mind that most employees rely on paper-based files to some extent in their work, this
8 hours per week can be taken as an average. Use average hourly rates to calculate the wage
spend this is costing your company.

http://ezinearticles.com/?Justifying-the-Cost-of-a-Document-Management-System&id=4996731
Business are unable to calculate the return on investment of document management, electronic content management (ECM) and
workflow software, the latest survey from NCC Research has found.

Of the 100 businesses surveyed, 27% said it was very difficult and 35% said it was difficult to measure ROI on these systems.

Organisations still have difficulty in retrieving and managing unstructured data, according to 73% of the businesses surveyed. Only 20% said
this was relatively trouble free.

Only 18% of companies said their information was held corporately and was available to all who need it. This contrasts with 52% who
conceded that vital corporate information was scattered around many different departmental systems and was hard to find.

http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2009/08/25/237446/Document-management-ROI-39too-
difficult-to-measure39.htm

http://www.atalasoft.com/savemillions

According to IDC the average office worker spends 2.4 hours per week converting documents from one format to
another

With Vizit you can quickly find the right document the first time! Vizit reduces the user’s time searching for documents

by providing a full document preview right in the search results. IDC estimates the average worker spends over 9

hours each week searching for documents and using Vizit will reduce this time by approximately 10%. ($285,000)

According to IDC the average office worker spends 3.8 hours reformatting documents per week.

According to IDC the average office worker spends 8.8 hours per week editing and reviewing documents

According to IDC the average office worker spends 9.6 hours per week analyzing information from different sources.

All figures are based on data from IDC Whitepapers (207682 & 05C4405A) and assume the average server supporting 200 users.