Nancy Gohring at ComputerWorld reports:
Managers waste hours every day looking for information that often turns out to be useless, according to a report from consulting firm Accenture Ltd.In a survey of 1,000 middle managers at large companies in the U.S. and U.K., Accenture found that managers spend as much as two hours a day searching for information — and more than half of the data they find has no value to them.
That’s one hour, every day, wasted by middle managers because their searches are ineffective. What a mess.
Information is often more difficult to find because it’s scattered, respondents said. Fifty-seven percent of those polled said that having to go to numerous sources to collect information makes managing data difficult. On average, the managers said they go to three different sources to find certain types of information….
Managers often face additional challenges because they don’t save important data in a collaborative place. The majority of the managers surveyed said they store their most valuable information on their computers or in individual e-mail accounts, where others can’t access it, Accenture said. Only 16% of managers said they store valuable data in a collaborative workspace, like an intranet portal.
Just under half — 42% — of those surveyed said they accidentally use the wrong information at least once a week.
Of all the managers surveyed, IT workers are the least likely to say the information they find is valuable, and they spend the most time trying to find it. They dedicate nearly 30% of their time trying to find information.
Until companies streamline the way that workers store data, information will continue to be a burden to knowledge workers, Accenture said.
I agree. I’ll add that we also need to streamline the way knowledge workers discover and track information when searching.
The paradigm for search today is built around stimulus-response queries at search engines, but most users engage in search as part of a larger inquiry with an end goal that is more complex and subtle than the intermediate search queries.
Think about online search for competive analysis, market research, or due diligence. Or it could be more consumer-centric, like buying a home, planning a vacation or looking for a job. For each of these searches the user will visit multiple, different search providers, and they will–more or less successfully–keep track of results across many many different websites. Some people keep track in their heads. Others use bookmarks or just keep tabs open or even print web pages out and put them in manilla folders.
There are a few tools out there helping with this: Onfolio, Google Notebook, ScrapBook, and Kaboodle. Of these, none seem to recognize the fact that the user is actively searching.
If you know of any others in this space, please chime in. Or if you’ve tried any of those listed, let me know how you like them. I’d love to hear about what’s out there and what people think.
This is the problem we are working on at SwitchBook, but I’m sure there are more players out there than I’ve discovered so far.
