London workers hampered by information graveyards, survey claims

Many employees left frustrated by painfully slow in-house database search facilities

search problems magnified: 46 per cent of city workers have been affected by inadequate company search facilities

Painfully slow information search facilities at work are leaving London's workforce frustrated, enterprise search specialist Sinequa has claimed.

The French software vendor, which commissioned research questioning 200 city workers, also claimed this lack of adequate search technology translates into an opportunity for the channel.

According to the results, 59 per cent of workers questioned said the search tools provided by their company were either poor or very poor. In addition, 46 per cent said that information searches within their organisation were 'generic and not comprehensive'.

Despite 88 per cent of respondents' employers investing in an intranet, none had looked at how to maximise the information on the intranet to help drive efficiencies in performance. In fact, just eight per cent of respondents have a tool allowing them to search information across the company using key search terms.

Colin Hadden, country manager of Sinequa, said: "Employees are struggling to find even basic information, which impacts their productivity on a day-to-day basis and you cannot help but conclude that businesses are seriously missing a trick. The likes of Google and Yahoo! mean that employees au fait with using search tools in order to search, access and connect with huge volumes of data to make informed purchasing decisions or plan a holiday etc in their personal lives. However, at present a large void exists between what they can do as consumers and what they can do as employees. This gap causes employee frustration, limits the value of corporate information and ultimately impacts business success.”

In the past month alone 46 per cent of respondents said that they could count up to ten occasions when not having access to the right information had impaired their performance. 16 per cent could recall ten or more times when this had happened. A further 40 per cent said that finding the information to support the development of a business critical document takes two to three hours on average, with a quarter stating it could take three hours or more.

Hadden continued: “During turbulent times companies need to ensure that they are streamlined and effective – and at the moment the research suggests they are not. These statistics provide a glimpse of how much this problem is costing business today. If this issue is framed in terms of lost-man hours, lost opportunity and employee dissatisfaction, its something that needs much more focus at the top level within a business. Giving employee’s intuitive access to information and knowledge is critical to sustaining business productivity. The primitive approaches prevalent in the capital fall well short of what corporate search technology can now deliver.”