Research conducted by Opinionography on behalf of Huddle explored the attitudes of professional service firms in the UK and the US towards collaboration technology. 38% of respondents admitted to storing the majority of their work documents on their local computer hard drive. 27% regularly store work on unsecured USB drives.
The costs of winning new business - and how to reduce them
The average bid for new business requires 84 hours of senior management input. This equates to almost $25k in costs. Better information and document management could help.
- 33% of respondents believe improving information collection across the organisation could reduce these costs
- 28% wanted better access to subject expert inputs
- 29% felt that improved version control could help
- 27% were concerned about duplication of effort
Other interesting findings – and opportunities for information professionals
- Despite professed concern over data security, 22% of firms are using personal cloud file-sharing tools to send documents to clients.
- 29% of respondents weren’t using their organisations favoured file sharing tool because they found it too complicated
- 22% said that their file-sharing tool is not used or allowed to be used by their client organisations
- 18% said their firms didn’t offer any suitable file sharing support
- 69% of respondents were sharing documents internally via email
- 68% had discovered they had been working on an old version of a document in the last six months
The cost of searching for a document
Just how much does the hunt for the right document actually cost organisations?
- In the UK, the average number of documents worked on each day is 25, each takes on average 136 seconds to find. With the average hourly rate of the respondents (£204) – each of these employees is costing £4,238 per year.
- In the US respondents work on an average of 26 documents per day and take 89 seconds to find each document. At an average hourly rate of $265, each respondent is losing their organisations $3,747 per year.
The full report is available here.