Too much info, too little relevance say IT execs

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IT managers are wasting almost a third of their working week trawling through information to get what they need to do their jobs.

And, even then, less than half (44 per cent) of the resultant data is, on average, of any value to them.

While these findings, a result of a survey of 1,000 middle managers, are new, the main hindrance cited is an enemy of old, with 42 per cent of IT managers claiming the problem is simply the existence of too much information.

Their management peers in other business areas such as customer service, finance and accounting, HR and sales and marketing also get a raw deal in terms of data access, generally spending up to two hours each day on information-gathering missions.

These statistics, which are the result of an Accenture survey of managers from large UK and US businesses with annual revenues of more than $500 million, show that 47 per cent of IT managers are affected by the information management minefield.

Half of all managers surveyed slammed their organisations for not doing a good enough job of disseminating relevant information departmentally or have any faith in overall information distribution governance.

"The findings show that companies are failing to get the right information to their employees," said Royce Bell, chief executive of Accenture Information Management Services (AIMS).

"People and organisations cannot keep up with the volume of information produced by technological innovation. Managers in particular are having great difficulty navigating a rapidly expanding sea of information, and the situation is only getting worse."

As the number of incoming and outgoing information generation channels grows, for example the recent explosion of users adopting mobile devices like Research in Motion's (RIM) BlackBerry, it is becoming essential that companies iron out their processes, warns Accenture.

"Information is becoming a burden on knowledge workers and will remain so until companies consolidate and streamline the stores and sources of intelligence," said Greg Todd, an AIMS senior executive.

"Doing so will enable them to give back part of the working day to staff, helped by better governance, delivery, integration and the archiving and retention of information."

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