The price of information overload
Connecting state and local government leaders
The cost of information overload adds up to $900 million a year in lost productivity in the United States.
The cost of information overload – and the relentless distractions knowledge workers face from e-mail, instant messages and Web explorations — adds to $900 million a year in lost productivity in the United States.
So declares Basex, a research firm, which released the estimate this week, along with a new online calculator that offers yet another useful information distraction for workers and their bosses.
The new online widget provides ballpark estimates – and we’re talking pretty large ball parks – of what companies or organizations stand to lose annually in lost productivity resulting from the overflow of information in today’s workplace.
Select “government” as your industry of choice in the calculator, enter the size of your organization – let’s say 100,000 employees for argument’s sake — and the proportion of your employees who are considered highly skilled (let’s be generous). Voila: the average government agency loses $909,900,000 to $1,273, 850,000 annually from lost productivity resulting from information overload.
The challenge isn’t so much that employees are goofing off by checking sports scores or shopping online as much as they are getting hit with a never-ending flow of information from inside and outside their organizations.
According to Basex, e-mail overload, Web site searches, and other more traditional distractions, such as phone calls chew up 28 percent of the work day for the average knowledge worker. Worse, all the interruptions are hurting concentration, further reducing productivity, a recent study by Basex found. Multiply that by average industry wages and the productivity losses mount quickly.
Of course, federal managers can take some solace in knowing that some of that lost productivity is being recouped as more and more workers are using information technology to work from home and elsewhere after hours.
Still, there’s a certain irony that the information technology companies that unleashed these office productivity tools are still struggling with ways to provide relief through smarter ways to manage all that information.
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