Getting more value from knowledge — especially from a firm’s own hard-won knowledge — is one of the central challenges facing companies today. Many organizations have approached this problem in recent years by making big investments in IT systems, especially content repositories and databases. For example, 70% of organizations with more than 10,000 employees have more than 100 separate content repositories.1 Despite such investments, many companies have not seen much in the way of returns.
A particularly egregious example is a Fortune 50 manufacturing firm that put more than 3 million documents, previously dispersed in more than 2,000 systems, into one database. In the first three years alone, the project’s budget came to more than $22 million. Unfortunately, the system mostly created confusion, as no changes were made in the way documents were presented to employees or to help them navigate the new system. The anticipated benefits from the substantial investment went largely unrealized.
As bad as this story sounds, it is not uncommon. A research report by analysts at International Data Group’s IDC estimated that an organization employing 1,000 knowledge workers might easily incur a cost of more than $6 million per year in lost productivity as employees fail to find existing knowledge they need, waste time searching for nonexistent knowledge and recreate knowledge that is available but could not be located.... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.
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