How Search Is Impacted When Your Company Is Over-Organized

The battle for efficiency rages on as companies begin to store information in more and more different mediums. Sure, they work great for document sharing, collaboration, and access while traveling, but it is still just another system to sift through. Whether it is the cloud, Dropbox or even Google Docs, someone is going to have to search quite dedicatedly in order to find what they are looking for, something that could be tedious and annoying at times.

The hard truth is that organization is a waste of time and resources according to a fresh infographic presented by Docurated (design by NowSourcing.) The fact of the matter is that no matter how much folder structure, keywords, or tags you have, documents are going to get lost. This leaves knowledge professionals with up to 50% of their time to search around for information, when they only spend 5%-15% reading it. On average, it takes about 18 minutes to search for a document and 7.5% of all documents get lost, not even counting the 3% that get mislabeled and are gone forever.

Cloud storage options have greatly improved collaboration levels and mobility of information, but has also made the “where the heck did I put this document?” question a company mantra. Each week, employees using the traditional file and folder document method spend five hours searching for docs, a little over two hours searching for, but not finding docs and another 2 hours recreating lost docs.

So if organization itself is a seemingly unsolvable problem, that doesn’t mean companies and employees will have to bite the bullet and accept that their job will have to be based off of searching. The solution is to look away from trying to “improve” organization, but rather making search more reliable and accurate. Instead of searching based only off keywords and tags and pulling of folders that might contain what you are looking for, visual results of only relevant and never duplicated results.

Want more out of your organization at your company? Think search instead! Take a look at this infographic for more and let us know what you think in the comments. Like what you see? Give it a share with your friends and leave us a comment letting us know what you think.