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Knowledge Sharing and Communities of Practice 143

This means that although 80 to 85 percent of a company ’ s information is hard-
to-access tacit knowledge, it does not appear that explicit knowledge is any easier to
fi nd and use. One IDC estimate ( Feldman 2004 ) found that 90 percent of a company ’ s
accessible information is used only once. The amount of time spent reworking or
recreating information because it has not been found, or worse, going ahead and
making decisions based on incomplete information, is increasing at an alarming rate.
The IDC study estimates that an organization with one thousand knowledge workers
loses a minimum of $6 million per year in time spent just searching for information.
The cost of reworking information because it has not been found costs that organiza-
tion a further $12 million a year. We can only imagine but not yet calculate the
increase in creativity and original thinking that might be unleashed if knowledge
workers had more time to think instead of futilely trying to fi nd existing
information.
In 2000, the IBM Institute conducted a survey of forty managers at a large
accounting organization to identify the sources of information people used in orga-
nizations that had a well-developed knowledge management system or infrastructure
( Bartlett 2000 ). The results showed that people still fi rst turned to people in order
to fi nd information, solve problems, and make decisions. In fact, the company

Box 5.1
An example: The cost of not fi nding information

The annual cost of a poorly designed knowledge base interface such as an intranet can
be easily calculated using the Excellent Intranet Cost Analyzer (extract from: : http://www
.dack.com/web/cost_analyzer.html).
There is a cost to not fi nding information. Although it is impossible to measure the exact cost of
employees not fi nding information on a company ’ s intranet, the tool below gives a ballpark fi gure.
Instructions:
1. Enter the number of a company ’ s employees.
2. Enter the average number of intranet pages each employee visits per day.
3. Enter the average number of seconds of confusion per page a company ’ s intranet users
will experience. That is, the number of seconds a user says “ This isn ’ t what I ’ m looking
for ” or “ Dammit! I ’ m lost. ” A typical range is between fi ve and twenty seconds.
4. Enter the average employee ’ s annual salary.
5. Push the Calculate button.
Source : http://www.dack.com/web/cost_analyzer.html