If only we could quantify the cost, monetary and otherwise, of not finding the information we need. If only we knew when we weren't finding it! The classic example of such failure is the volunteer on a Johns Hopkins research project who died when given a drug whose adverse effects were documented in the medial literature prior to 1966, literature that wasn't found by the researchers. Susan Feldman further discusses the implications of NOT finding information in her KM World article, "The High Cost of Not Finding Information."
Particularly pertinent to law firms is the question "How much time is spent reworking or recreating information because it has not been located?" According to Feldman, "Recent research on knowledge work shows that knowledge workers spend more time recreating existing information than they do turning out information that does not already exist."
Wow. You'd think with all this technology we'd be more efficient and productive than that! But simply storing important information in a cental location in electronic form won't help much unless you can find and retrieve it quickly and easily.
The silver bullet may be the Google-like interface that we all seem to crave. In her conclusion, Feldman states "The first thing knowledge workers need is easy access to information through a single interface. One search should get them all the information in a company, no matter where it resides or what format it is in."
Until we can provide information to our users without requiring them to figure where it is located, they'll be doomed to repeat themselves..over and over again.
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