A new report from marketing research firm Wakefield Research and data analysts Elastic found that fifty-four per cent of U.S. office professionals report wasting time searching for files they need in cluttered online filing systems.
Nearly 20% of the 1,000 respondents ranked “digging for files they need” as their No. 1 problem, while another 58% of the office pros said finding files and documents was a “top-three problem.”
When organisations respond to this kind of problem, often the solution is a new search tool or a new file management system – and a 2019 McAffee study found that the average enterprise uses 76 file-sharing services.
The truth is that while implementing more advanced search and file-sharing might help around the edges, these tools don’t get to the core of this issue.
If your staff are unaware certain content exists in your organisation they won’t search for it. And if they know it exists, but it was badly labelled years ago, your staff won’t be able to find it.
Even if they know it exists AND it was well labelled and structured – the peak of most knowledge management today – once they’ve found it they still need to read and digest it and then apply it to the challenge or the document they are trying to write.
This takes time and cognitive ability. Staff must not only read the material but understand it in context and apply it effectively to a new purpose, requiring mental freshness and constant attentiveness.
This is where AI comes it. By using AI to read, understand and hold all this content in memory contextually, you’re able to rapidly repurpose what your organisation ‘knows’ into what it needs today.
Your human team can now focus on taking the AI’s draft content and finalising it for distribution, rather than wasting productive time on searching for knowledge or recreating what already exists.
This is a paradigm shift in how organisations think and act on information and opens new opportunities to reuse existing knowledge from across an organisation to generate new value.
Even better, AI can continually ingest new content both from within and without your organisation to uncover new insights and value, directed by your human team.
So rather than implementing that new search tool, that new way to organise and share files or that new naming structure for new documents, leaving your past knowledge in whatever state it is in today, consider organising a call with one of our team at reKnow.
We’d love to discuss how our AI solutions might provide you with a new approach to managing, accessing and reusing knowledge. And you’ll get to stop digging the same knowledge management hole.
Move the needle
In 2001, IDC published a white paper, “The High Cost of Not Finding Information,” noting that knowledge workers were spending two and a half hours a day searching for information.
Ten years ago in 2012, McKinsey reported that “employees spend 1.8 hours every day—9.3 hours per week, on average—searching and gathering information.”
And in 2018 an IDC study found that “data professionals are losing 50% of their time every week” — 30% searching for, governing and preparing data plus 20% duplicating work.
All the search and knowledge management technologies corporations have introduced over the last twenty years have barely moved the needle on the amount of time knowledge workers spend searching for and preparing knowledge that already exists in their organisations for reuse.
Clearly, there has to be a better way to raise the productivity and effectiveness of knowledge workers, but it’s unlikely to emerge from doing the same thing over and over again.
To move the needle, raise productivity and prevent corporate knowledge from going to waste, we need to think differently about how we arm knowledge workers to discover, access and reuse knowledge.
Here’s where Artificial Intelligence comes in. Previous methods of knowledge management were limited to helping to organise and catalogue knowledge to be easier to find and access when required. They didn’t help knowledge workers to comprehend or repurpose existing knowledge to generate new value for organisations. They relied on what human teams remembered and worked at human speeds for reading and comprehension – and finally on human speeds for producing new content from old.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) moves the needle by removing the human limits on speed while continuing to involve humans in the production and distribution of content and the creation of value.
Rather than relying on human discovery capability, AI can read, understand and repurpose all of an organisation’s relevant knowledge to meet new organisational challenges and needs in mere minutes, then hand over draft content to humans to add that spark of creativity and insight that AI can’t match.
AI does the heavy lifting humans aren’t good at – identifying and comprehending relevant bodies of text and allows human teams to focus on their strengths, editing and refining to perfection.
This approach transforms corporate workflows and dramatically moves the needle on productivity, providing a new way to approach knowledge work that values the skills of AIs and humans alike.
If you’re interested in learning more, or exploring what the impact could be for your organisation, reach out and schedule a conversation with reKnow today.