How current knowledge management tools are deterring enterprise productivity, profitability, and performance

While the importance of knowledge management is at the forefront of many enterprise leaders’ minds, implementation of its tools and methods is easier said than done. Ineffective knowledge management can generate more harm than good for large organizations, revealing a current trend in poor knowledge management-based decision making.

KMWorld recently held a webinar sponsored by Starmind titled, “The Failure and Cost of Poor Knowledge Management in Large Enterprises—Research Report Key Findings,” featuring speaker Ronan Kirby, chief customer officer at Starmind, who outlined the major pain-points of current knowledge management tools, backed by a Starmind study which surveyed 1,400 knowledge workers at enterprises with more than 10,000 employees within the U.S., U.K., Germany, and Switzerland.

Providing context for the report’s findings, Kirby illustrated the modern enterprise environment which has facilitated unproductive knowledge access. According to Kirby, the existence of knowledge silos is recognized as one of the worst issues that large enterprises face today. These siloes, which slow performance and negatively impact productivity and agility, are massive obstacles toward competitive business performance. Significant portions of company resources are underutilized through the presence of knowledge silos; work is being duplicated, a significant amount of time is wasted on trying to find information that may or may not exist within said silos, and enterprise knowledge cannot be effectively leveraged. According to the report, 77% of those surveyed think that access to information has gotten harder through remote and hybrid working—illustrating a need for modernized knowledge management solutions.

Kirby placed a hefty number on the cost of inaccessible knowledge: a starting figure of $71M.

This number is broken down as the following: 102 minutes every day is spent looking for answers, resulting in 4.25M hours lost in companies with 10,000 employees at a $16.73 average hourly wage, cumulating into a final annual bill of $71,102,500 per company.

Kirby explained that this quantifiable data is a result of traditional knowledge management tools failing to perform their functions effectively. According to the report, 70-90% of data within an organization is ROT (redundant, outdated, trivial), and does not provide any actionable insights for an enterprise. Sixty-nine percent of surveyed employees found that they could have avoided a key mistake if they had access to the right people or information, and many find current tools to be unreliable, limited, slow, or complex as repositories of information.

Inaccessible knowledge trickles into numerous areas of business functions; executives found the following to be affected by missing information:

• 63% report delays in responding to customers.
• 60% report delays in project completion.
• 64% report delays in product updates.
• 60% report delayed proposals and lost sales.

Appropriate tools for knowledge management are becoming increasingly critical; tools like ticketing systems or google docs cannot supply employers and employees with the right information effectively enough. Employees being forced to make necessary business decisions based on gut-instinct rather than accurate knowledge draws an infinity of detrimental consequences to business performance; modernizing knowledge management tools is key to furthering business endeavors and empowering employees to do so.

To download the full report, please visit https://www.starmind.ai/.

You can view an archived version of this webinar here.