And you say you cannot afford it?
Newly updated research (independently conducted but sponsored by Oracle) finds that the average worker spends approximately 60 minutes a week hunting for information NOT in a content management system. Furthermore, users creating information spend 74 minutes a week copying, pasting and duplicating data between documents.
terms of percentages this means that 2.5% of work time is lost to looking for the right information in paper drawers, email and shared drives. Lets call this search Lag.
Over 3% of work time is spent reinventing the wheel as people move digital bits from one document or form into another. Lets call this productivity Drag. Add it up and workers spend over 5% of their time hunting for or reinventing information.
All this lag and drag on the organization costs real money in salary. It doesn’t begin to calculate the cost of synchronizing information across all those duplicates, the cost of storing all that duplicate information, the cost of using the WRONG or OUTDATED version of something they found.
But lets bring this down to specifics.
The US bureau of Labor Statistics finds that average full time wages are 48,789 per year in 2010 (across all employment sectors. for the first 2 quarters *PDF*) Using this and rounding down to be conservative we calculate that the lack of a good Enterprise Information Management System and practice costs US companies $2700.00 per worker per year in search lag and productivity drag.
Now just having a system in place doesn’t do any good. Great plumbing is just pipes. It’s only useful if used. This means that you need to consider the total cost of ownership – licensing, solution and roll-out.
Even with the best systems in the world, people will still search and copy/paste. But they’ll do it less frequently and with greater efficiency. So the ROI will be based on some fraction of that $2700 per person per year.
Let’s say we can improve that lag/drag by just 33%. This would mean that instead of a worker spending 116 hours a year in lag and drag, they now spend 78 hours a year in lag and drag – not great but better than before. Even this modest gain SAVES, on average, over $891 per worker per year. A 50% boost in lag and drag saves over $1350 per worker per year.
A small organization with 50 users (say 40 consumers and 10 contributors) could see a pro forma savings of about $45,000 in year 1 on the conservative side and over $67,000 on the up side of productivity boosts. That is equivalent to information management systems and adopted solutions being able to eliminate 1 full time position. But lets put this in a positive light since we’re all hoping for the economic rebound. That means that your small company can grow capacity with your existing staff.
In terms of ROI this means that to recover the cost of a $250,000 project in one year you need a user community of 183 – 278 depending on your lag and drag improvements. These are relatively small numbers. I would pose the question though: how many capital projects with budgets of $250,000 expect to see ROI in one year? Across 3 years this means that you need a user community of 61-93.
All this is to show that real research shows a real drag and lag on businesses that is directly traceable to a lack of a unified and centralized enterprise information management system and adopted solutions and practices that are built on top of that foundation. Here at Fishbowl Solutions we take ROI and cost calculations seriously. We just published a case study with one of our clients who realized over $1,000,000 in ROI in one year. You can get the PDF here.
The other thing to remember is that buying the license to a system alone is NOT ENOUGH. You must implement solutions that address the lag and drag business problems and that engage users. This is why Fishbowl Solutions stands out from the crowd. We are focused on business problems and solving them forever. We build our solutions on top of Oracle E20 (ECM and WebCenter and SOA) because it is the best platform in our opinion. But it is our solutions that bring the power and sophistication of the platform to end users with ease and simplicity. The combination of the two is what yields the real ROI and savings for your organization.
If you want to find out more, email us at [email protected]
