I’ve spent the past week re-writing the business plan.  Followers of this blog will know exactly how I feel about that. 

The good news is that it came out 12 pages shorter.  That at least saves a few electronic trees.  The other excellent news is that I found a number of recent reports that apply specifically to what we do.

Back in January, a teensy tiny company called Accenture conducted a survey of 1000+ middle managers in the US and UK.  No typo, that’s one thousand managers.  The purpose was "to uncover wide-ranging insights about the way they gather, use and analyze information."

The title of the press release rather gives the game away:  "Managers Say the Majority of Information Obtained for Their Work Is Useless".

Here are some highlights:

• Each manager spends two hours per day searching for information
• 59 percent said they miss valuable information almost daily because they can not find it
• 57 percent said that having to go to numerous sources to compile information was a difficult aspect of managing information for their jobs
• 53 percent said less than half of the information they find has value to them
• 45 percent said gathering information about what other parts of their company are doing is a big challenge — it was easier to find out what the competition were up to
• 42 percent said they accidentally use the wrong information at least once a week

We live, eat and breathe this stuff, and I still find those numbers shocking…

Categories: Old Posts
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