A better world, one thought at a time!
. . . about research, collaboration, design, startups, and pandas
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How to burn money
The inability to find what you are searching for is frustrating and demoralizing. Now you can add "wasteful" to the list of descriptions. Research from IDC indicates the cost of not finding information is $3300 per person per year. For an average mid-sized company, that is an annual $1.65 million virtual bonfire, the equivalent of 194 panda chairs.
And there are no style points awarded for this kind of money burning.
How did they come up with this number? Apparently, the sum of all inefficiencies
- ineffective searches
- inconsistent access tools
- re-created content
- reformats and revisions
as factors in causing employees to not find the information they need. No business should be burning this much money, especially in these times of austerity. The challenge though is to pinpoint a solution, precisely because this cash bonfire involves non-cash items.
Are collaboration technologies the answer to the problem? The latest craze is around transferring social media from consumer space to enterprise. Would Enterprise Collaboration 2.0 stop the annual bonfire?
Collaboration is about managing resources: time, tasks, employees, etc. The underlying factor is the human factor, and with it is the culture, something that forms automatically when more than one person gathers together. In short, different cultures that define different companies and their different departments require different collaboration strategies, and thus different solutions. In the collaboration space, there is no such thing as one-size-fits-all.
Now enough with the talk, show me the money: what is the ROI? When expenditures are directly correlated to cash items, such as staffing a research and development team, use of collaboration solutions indeed affects positive ROI. Opportunity cost to developing or hosting your own infrastructure also produces good ROI.
Finally, being mindful of the digital wasteland phenomenon helps with a better ROI too.
The Digital Wasteland
Sending your people to the digital wasteland to die is not a great way to manage your empire. I'm sure we can all relate to the hallowing tales of workers venturing out into a collection of data, information, and knowledge that is in the state of FUBAR, only to never return. But how did this disaster happen in the first place?
There are basically two reasons why digital wastelands threaten otherwise 'irrigable' information systems.
- Lack of policy to collect data and control information.
- No reason or use for data and information collected.
The first reason leads to rampant hoarding of stuff. This leads to increased costs to maintain the stuff: measures to sort it, measures to access it, measures to transform it, and measures to keep it secure. And none of these are linear or sub-linear correlations to the amount of data you have.
The second reason is the all important human factor. In business, all things exist for a reason: to serve humans. If there is no human in the use case scenario, please go back to the drawing board. Sure, it is justifiable to collect things in the event that they are needed someday - the pack-rat logic. Or maybe the computer needs it for some of its calculations - after all, computers are SMRT and they need everything. But consider the costs mentioned earlier, and consider what is actually needed, your friend Mr. ROI will thank you later.
We are not advocating "not collecting information". We are advocating smart collection, with the human factor in mind, and supporting policies to turn your wasteland into a treasure island.
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A better world, one thought at a time!
