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Further to the above thread - this may be the missing reference: "It has been estimated that the average company with a 1.000 employees loses $11million each year as a result of inefficiencies in Information Management practices" - J. Popkin "10 ways to waste time on Document Management" Part 1 and Part 2 Gartner Group February 26 1997 Maybe the Records Management Society should take a lead on this (and the Classification/Taxonomy discussion) in order to enable RM's to better promote the profession? Regards Lawrence Lawrence Rodgers Information Management Consultants (IMC) Ltd 12 Victoria Park Colwyn Bay LL29 7AX Tel: 01492 532534 Mob: 07932 175007 e: [log in to unmask] Information in this message is confidential and may be legally privileged. If you are not the intended recipient, please notify the sender and please delete the message from your system immediately. _____ From: The UK Records Management mailing list [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Andrew Warland Sent: 27 July 2008 01:21 To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: How successful has RM been? The Unversity of California research referred to by Chris may have been 'How much information'. The link is http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info-2003/ If you read nothing else, the executive summary is fascinating, and kind of 'did you know' treasure trove. For example: - A tree can produce 80,500 sheets of paper. - 786 million trees to produce the world's annual paper supply - Ninety-two percent of new information is stored on magnetic media, primarily hard disks. Film represents 7% of the total, paper 0.01%, and optical media 0.002%. - 800 MB of recorded information is produced per person each year. It would take about 30 feet of books to store the equivalent of 800 MB of information on paper. - The vast majority of original information on paper is produced by individuals in office documents and postal mail, not in formally published titles such as books, newspapers and journals. - Published studies on media use say that the average American adult uses the telephone 16.17 hours a month, listens to radio 90 hours a month, and watches TV 131 hours a month. About 53% of the U.S. population uses the Internet, averaging 25 hours and 25 minutes a month at home, and 74 hours and 6 minutes a month at work - about 13% of the time. In relation to the egovmonitor article, I also suspect, like Peter Kurilecz, that these are the equivalent of urban myths, although a quick search through Snopes showed that it hasn't quite reach that hallowed territory. But if we break down the quote: - Four weeks a year searching for information. If there are 250 working days in a year, and you take up to 10 minutes a day, throughout the day, to find information, that is 2,500 minutes, 41 hours, so around one week (depending where you work, of course). If that statistic was correct, the average worker is spending up to 40 minutes a day, throughout the day, looking for (presumably work related) information. Doesn't sound right to me. - 70% more records than needed are retained. Possible, particularly the electronic versions of paper. But who knows if it's 50% or 99%. - Between 1 and 5% of all records are misfiled. From my experience with poorly designed functions based BCS terms, this wouldn't surprise me. Maybe even higher. - Office workers can waste up to two hours a day looking for misplaced paperwork. See point one above. That's an *awful* lot of time trying to find stuff. My experience suggests it's 5 to 10 minutes max then give up or ring the records manager.. Andrew Warland Senior Consultant, Records and Information Management Solutions Converga (Australia) P: 02-92682348 M: 0413043934 F: 02-92647455