OK, I've got a confession to make.
Am I guilty of spreading an urban legend? Yikes.
Many of us cite a 1998 study by Coopers & Lybrand (1998) in our presentations...
Some of the typical data points...
- 90% of corporate memory exists on paper
- Out of pages that get handled in the office, 90% are merely shuffled
- The average document gets copied 19 times
- Companies spend an estimated $20 inlabor to file a document, $120 in labor to find a misfiled document, and $220 in labor to reproduce a lost document
- 7.5% of all documents get lost, 3% of the remainder get misfiled, a total 10.5% of problematic documents
- Professionals spend 5-15% of their time reading information, but spend 50% looking for it
- A typical worker spends thirty minutes to two hours a day searching for documents
Etc. Etc.
We've all used this information or a variant of it a MILLION times in presentations.
A question -- Does anyone have the original report? Does anyone know the actual name of the report?
One of the presenters at our ECM Seminars mentioned the data, and an attendee asked for the original source.
Having used the data a million times myself, I searched first my hard drive. No dice.
Then the web. No dice. Many references to the "1998 Coopers & Lybrand report," no actual copy or link.
Oops.
So, just to satisfy my compulsiveness, does anyone have the actual report? I am offering a bounty and more importantly, fame and fortune in the content management community to anyone who can deliver the actual report to me.
I will give a free AIIM membership for a year ($125) for anyone who can satisfy my curiosity and can deliver the actual report to my email.
While I'm at it cleaning up loose ends, how about the ORIGINAL source for an even more difficult one -- "80% of the information in organizations is unstructured." Same deal.
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