According to a new Information Management survey of 1000 middle managers in the UK and US conducted by Accenture, 42% of managers spend between one to two hours a day looking for the information they need, half of which has "no value" to them. A fairly frustrating experience all round, it would seem.

"I do not find this particularly surprising," says Royce Bell, CEO of Accenture Information Management Services. The problem of managers having to find their way through an ever-growing choice of information sources and identify what they need is something he sees all the time when going in to help companies manage information better. Almost 60% of respondents felt that their work might be suffering because of poor information distribution in their firms.

Bell thinks that companies have not necessarily caught up with technology in the same way that most people have in their own homes where they use active filing systems and search facilities. "There is a need for an information service in the middle somewhere between alerts which send information out as things happen and slower methods," says Bell. This "middle-piece" might provide updates hourly or daily. Typically, says Bell, companies use an intranet system to store and update the right kind of information, made available to different people on their screens (perhaps organised by function such as HR or marketing).

The survey also revealed that 40% of respondents found it hard to get information from within their own organisations. This should be easy to do, says Bell. But the interesting point is that people guard their own information and there is a reluctance to share knowledge, which has always been one of the big challenges for corporate HR since the beginnings of 'knowledge management' as a discipline. So, says Bell, companies need the right governance and reward structures to encourage people to share information.

By Morice Mendoza

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