Managers spend up to two hours a day searching for information. This productivity drain occurs because the majority of managers store information on local hard drives and in individual e-mail accounts. Only 16 percent use a collaborative workplace such as a company’s intranet portal.
The Solution:
Web designers and developers are in a unique position to improve corporate productivity by helping organizations store and retrieve valuable information via a Web portal.
The Economics:
Assuming that the corporate expense for a middle manager is $50 per hour (substitute your own figure here), two hours of lost productivity equates to a daily productivity drain of $100 per manager. An organization with 10 middle managers loses $1,000 of productivity per day simply trying to find information! This calculation can be used to estimate the return on investment that the development of an intranet can bring to an organization.
Additional Background:
The data was compiled as a result of an online survey of more than 1,000 middle managers of large companies in the United States and United Kingdom. It was coordinated by Accenture and a press release is available for review.
Additional findings include the following:
More than half (59 percent) of middle managers said that as a consequence of poor information distribution, they miss information that might be valuable to their jobs almost every day because it exists somewhere else in the company and they just can’t find it.
Nearly half (45 percent) of respondents said gathering information about what other parts of their company are doing is a big challenge.
- Web developers can develop their own intranet to easily access technology that may be valuable, but not easy to access, if stored in books at a remote location. For example, I have decided to move the contents of my technology books online for my benefit and the benefit of students I work with at CDIABU. Check out the beta version of the Web Apprentices Training Center.
- Web developers can utilize the results of this survey as a catalyst to explore the marketplace for "content management." One open-source solution for managing online content is WordPress.com. Check out the beta version of the Web Apprentices Training Center Blog created using WordPress that will allow readers to comment on the Web Apprentices Training Center.
