Knowledge workers deal with huge volumes of unstructured information in the form of news, documents, e-mails, videos, web pages, instant messages, and more. Research shows:
- Information workers spend up to 30 per cent of their working day looking for data. (The Butler Group)
- Only 44 per cent of corporate users can find the file or information they are looking for in an enterprise’s vast stores of data, compared with the 86 per cent or so of Internet users searching online. (Forrester Research)
- Less than 20 per cent of employee knowledge is documented. Over 80 per cent is stored in the minds of employees. (Delphi Group)
- 63 per cent of employees identify the difficulty of accessing undocumented knowledge as a major problem. (Delphi Group)
Social computing collaboration tools enhance productivity by providing a platform for communicating and sharing information. Enabling employees to go beyond documents and across repositories to unlock information, making it easier to consume, find people and locate expertise in an enterprise. Resulting business benefits include:
Productivity Increases
- Reduces employee time spent looking and searching for information
- Increases employee productivity by streamlining everyday business processes
- Speeds project delivery with greatly reduced delays as up to date information becomes available
- Provides easy access to critical information and expertise means better decision making and increased efficiency
Reduce Information Overload
- Reduces information overload by presenting important information in an easily digestible format
- Reduces e-mail ‘noise’ by reducing e-mail duplication and internally-generated spam
Connect Employees to Information and Expertise
- Enables finding experts in organisations more efficiently
- Provides greater awareness of new information, current initiatives, progress and status
Streamline Business Processes
- Streamlines content driven, collaborative business processes by providing the tools and platform for automating tasks of these processes
- Improves communication and coordination in people-driven processes
More Effective Communication and Collaboration
- Takes advantage of all employee knowledge and expertise through easy and structured access
- Provides the ability to find information independently, to share ideas and ask questions of others
- Provides employees with a clear channel for suggesting improvements and ideas in a structured manner
(All statistics above are drawn from independent research studies by Forrester, McKinsey, Gartner and the Association of Support Professionals.)