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