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.
Sneezing Baby Panda
Let's hope that this family lives in Canada, the land of free healthcare. We have actually featured this little clip on our 404 page, i.e. whenever Thinkpanda virtually sneezes. Try it out: www.thinkpanda.com/314159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937.
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A better world, one thought at a time!
