80% of the Employees Say Poor Information Management Causes Productivity Demise

Employees in 4 out of every 5 organization says productivity greatly suffers because of poor information management. It is a problem that just can’t be ignored observing the amount of data companies are generating; may it be employees or consumers, we live in a digital ecosystem where information makes the bulk of corporate infrastructure. 

The 2019 Global Intelligent Information Management Benchmark Report from M-Files states that most organizations in the future will gravely suffer if they fail to address the information management issues. It is extremely important that businesses can effectively manage the information they have. 

Greg Milliken, the senior vice president of marketing at M-Files, believes that irrespective of the size of the organization, information management practice is something that must be addressed as a priority. 

We live in a day and age of technology where information is produced at a rapid pace. Milliken believes that organizations require more intelligent information management solutions which dramatically change the way present organizations are managing and processing information. By adopting newer methodologies and technologies businesses can find a better way to assimilate and process information and use it to add greater value to the business operations of the organization. 

A Survey on Poor Information Management

Recently a survey was conducted among 1,500 corporate employees working in various private and public sector organizations. The agenda was to understand the handling practices of information. 

This polling was conducted by a market research firm Vanson Bourne where the market analysts reached out to all sorts of small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and large enterprises. 

The research analyst performed the research for organizations in over nine different countries. These countries were the U.S., Australia, Finland, Germany, France, New Zealand, Sweden, Austria, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. Here are the results which they gathered using the said survey. 

What is the Impact of Poor Information Management?

As per why 80% of the employees working in various organizations believe their productivity gets hurt by poor information management; it is because poor information management leads to difficulty in effectively communicating business operations and navigating through various important systems. 

Commonly, businesses use effective emailing, shared networking, drives, and folders to share information. This information usually exist in an office file format that gets interchanged between laptops and personal computers. Often businesses mislabel documents or add incorrect files/folders. 

How does poor information management impact most businesses and their respective employees? 

• More than 46% of the individuals believe finding information becomes a cumbersome task. 
• Almost 4% of the employees are able to find the most recent format of the business documents. 
• More than 74% of employees find it difficult to apply a digital signature through smartphones.
• Out of every 10 employees, 8 claim that they had to recreate important documents because they can’t find them anywhere.
• Only 1 in 4 enterprises have their own stable & dedicated document management systems.

If organizations don’t secure their information, they can have a great detrimental effect on its human and financial resources. Therefore, the survey showed that 91% of the employees agreed, their jobs can become a whole lot easier if they are aware of where the information is located. If there is some sort of a centralized location such as a drive or a dedicated server, half of their problems can be easily solved. 

When asked, another barrier that affected the productivity and effectiveness of individuals relating to information management was the improper or incorrect labeling of documents. Almost 42% of the employees complained that some of the most important information was misplaced or lost because of mislabeling. Another 41% claimed information which they were searching up was stored in the wrong folder or are unidentifiable within the system. 29% believed that the information was lost. 

Some Important Data Points From the Survey 

• 86% experience challenges when it comes to searching for information they need to do their job
• 65% experience challenges in reviewing, approving and signing documents
• 74% are not able to sign company documents on a mobile device when they need to
• 64% find it challenging and time-consuming to find the documents they need on a mobile device
• 88% said a reliable search tool from a single place would be beneficial no matter where the data is stored

Concluding Thoughts

So here’s what we deduced from the following survey. 

Multiple businesses store most of their information manually and when they are doing so, they utilize outdated structures that are part of larger unintegrated systems. With so much information being generated by the organizations, this practice is quite highly inefficient and can result in data loss.  

The need for integrating a modern information management system becomes necessary. Good technology can help assimilate important documents in a centralized location and can provide strong search parameters. Therefore, organizing and finding information becomes less complicated. 

As a result, employees can become more productive and can spend the proper time working on projects.