RivalMap Blog
March 17th, 2008
The need for central information repositories
MSNBC posted an article today based on a recent Workplace Productivity Survey, commissioned by LexisNexis. The survey highlights the large amount of time often wasted in the workplace searching for existing information, and sorting through piles of emails. The article sums up some interesting findings of the survey:
- 62 percent of professionals report that they spend a lot of time sifting through irrelevant information to find what they need; 68 percent wish they could spend less time organizing information and more time using the information that comes their way.
- Workers admit that not being able to lay their hands on the right information at the right time impedes their ability to work efficiently; 85 percent agree that not being able to access the right information at the right time is a huge time-waster.
- More than 40 percent of the survey participants indicate an inability to handle future increases in information flow.
- While an average workday for white-collar workers is 8.89 hours, the survey finds that on average, 7.89 working hours are used conducting research, attending meetings, and searching for previously created documents.
- White-collar professionals spend an average of 2.3 hours daily conducting online research, with one in 10 spending four hours or more on an average day.
A big source of the information overload is email. What started out as a means of personal communication has been forced into becoming the sole means of sharing information in many companies. Rather than putting information in a place the people that find it relevant can access, workers often overuse the ":cc" function and blast out emails to anyone that might be a relevant recipient. The result, of course, is that the email inbox quickly becomes overloaded. To add to the problem, email clients weren't meant for organizing information for an indefinite period of time, so finding information at a later date sent via email can be a big time sink.
To fix the problem, companies need to provide their workers with easy-to-adopt central repositories:
We encourage our customers to shift away from using email to communicate competitor or market information , and start centralizing as much as possible. The net result of using something like RivalMap is that the right information can be easily found at the right time, since workers know exactly where to find the information, and since the organization methods are meant for handling information, not personal correspondence, the time saved in searching for info is a lot less than wading through old emails.
In fact, we've got some great features coming in a few weeks that will be huge time-savers, so keep an eye out for the announcement ;).
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We use this blog to post product updates, and also to discuss all of our experiences and insights on business, competition, technology, and the relationships between them.
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