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| | Excerpt from: Into the MyST | | | March 16, 2004 | | As an accountant, I learned about opportunity cost and ways to measure it. The opportunity costs associated with not finding information when its most needed is more difficult to calculate. | |
As indicated in the
article of the same title (by
Susan
Feldman), knowledge worker output is difficult to
measure, so it's not surprising that opportunity costs relative to information
resources are also tough to quantify. However, it's pretty easy to measure how
information workers use their time. A friend of mine (Carlos Caballero) has developed a worksheet that helps you (and your firm) identify
how much time you spend on information-work that can be directly related to
the cost of not performing tasks.
"There is a
problem experienced by every overworked executive, manager and staff alike: the
cost of not doing certain tasks just because the overhead required renders it
anti-economic, or obsolete by the time it is completed. That problem is more and
more common as a result of shrinking IT resources, the elevated cost of
customized applications, and the long backlog faced by IT. Information workers
face the need to do what they can with what they have, and that tends to
sacrifice the more resource-intensive tasks, regardless of how critical they are
for corporate missions." -- Carlos Caballero
The objective [it seems] in creating a
more operationally efficient information framework is to adopt tools and
processes that lower the overhead of performing tasks critical to the
business. That overhead must be just a skinch less than
anti-economic. Some tasks are extremely anti-economic while
others are probably borderline cases (i.e., low-hanging fruit that can be picked
by adopting a few simple changes).
By encouraging your staff to CC a single important
email message per week to an information repository you will begin to
build a useful knowledge base of information that would otherwise vanish from
corporate awareness. Following this basic (and frictionless) policy
a team of 25 people will generate 1,250 information objects that are
preserved and searchable and will raise your corporate knowledge
continuity. | | |
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