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…