The High Cost of Not Finding Information

Businesses generally have a pretty good on handle on how much they spend to acquire information, but sometimes it's what they *don't* know that really trips them up. For instance, in 1999 NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter spacecraft traveled 416 million miles without a hitch only to crash on impact because a contractor had submitted acceleration data in pounds of force rather than its metric equivalent, newtons. Studies by IDC, AIIM, Reuters and others have shown that knowledge workers spend from 15% to 35% of their time searching for information, but searchers are only successful in finding what they're looking for about 50% of the time. Forty percent of corporate users report that they can't find the information they need to do their jobs on their intranets. And recent research shows that knowledge workers spend more time recreating existing information than they do turning out new information. A 1999 IDC study of the phenomenon they dubbed "knowledge work deficit" estimated that the cost of intellectual rework and inability to find knowledge resources worked out to about $5,000 per worker per year.