Businesses wasting time looking for documents?

You probably can't read too much into a survey of just 60 "information governance professionals", if only because a majority of Australian businesses are unlikely to employ that kind of specialist.

After all, the most recent figures provided by the Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research state that 96 percent of all Australian businesses are small businesses, ie those with fewer than 20 employees.

So a study where only one-third of respondents work in organisations with fewer than 200 employees is hardly representative.

It seems plausible that very small businesses are likely to to a better job of document management, if only because just one or two people are likely to be responsible for storing and using the business documents and therefore can keep track of them relatively easily.

As more people get involved, there are more opportunities for documents to go astray.

Despite my implied criticism, that's actually consistent with the results of a recent survey of information governance professionals conducted for EMC Australia.

The headline finding was that Australian businesses spend more than 20 hours per week on average looking for difficult-to-find records, and that mid-sized organisations spend almost twice this amount of time.

Presumably small businesses probably don't have so much of a problem in the first place as they have fewer documents to manage and fewer people to misplace them, while larger businesses can afford to employ specialist staff and the systems needed to keep things under control.

But Hydrasight, the company that analysed the results [corrected 19/01/10] for EMC, thinks respondents are likely to be underestimating the effort needed to locate difficult-to-find or misplaced records inside their own organisations because they have a narrow view of business records and are confident of their own classification and retrieval capabilities.

Furthermore, John Brand, Research Director at Hydrasight, said "organisations may also be underestimating the potential impact that remote and mobile computing may be having on their information governance policies and practices."

Even though more than 50% of documents are created or saved electronically by the organisations surveyed, only 10% of respondents were very confident that documents related to commitments and obligations made by themselves and their staff were recorded, complete and retrievable.

Source: - http://www.itwire.com/content/view/30548/1151/