I'm trying a bit of cross-posting here with UserLand's blog.
A member of our team found a set of stats from a Fast Company article that are astounding. The numbers are so big as to not be believable. But when you think about it, it could be pretty close to the truth. I know many in IT dismiss the idea that the current crop of productivity tools have a really long way to go before they can be said to enhance real productivity, but based on my experience over the past few years, they are still a long way off. We just won't know how much time we saved until we fix the problem.
To prove the point, we created a simplistic Calculator for another project (Corporate Smarts) to help you assess the waste in your own organization. Its a rather simple concept that leverages data from two studies - one by Northop/Grumman and the other by KPMG. The Northop/Grumman study concluded that knowledge workers overall spend about 12% of their time searching for someone who can help them answer a question. The second was a KPMG study that reported finding 60% of all employees in large and medium-sized organizations spent about 1 hour per day duplicating the work of others. So, for fun, this Calculator allows you to enter the number of employees in your organization, about what you pay them, a distraction coefficient and then it calculates the value of the time wasted. You can even modify the percentages if you think you are either doing better or worse then the "averages" suggested by KPMG and Northop/Grumman. The amount of time (and money) wasted is phenomenal.
Even if its only a percentage of those numbers - the frustration level caused by the inability to find someone to answer your questions compounded by the fact that your probably doing the work for the Nth time should make you rethink the technical solutions for some of these basic business processes.
3:56:44 PM 
|
