Eliminating hidden IT costs that needlessly weaken your organization

Of course, there are many more IT costs, including a subtle, 'under-the-skin' cost that is not immediately visible in the accounts. Invisible, yes – but a cost that structurally causes a waste of time, money and productivity. These hadden IT costs are related to the problem of 'unfindable information'. How much time per day do you spend searching for information? And are your searches always successful? What is true for you is equally true – exceptions excluded – for your colleagues. So make a quick calculation of the amount of wasted time...

The waste of IT budget is worse than you think

According to a McKinsey report, employees spend an average of just over 1.8 hours per workday searching and gathering information. That amounts to over 9 hours per week – more than a full workday! And it is by no means a marginal problem – for nearly four in ten employees, the most time-consuming administrative task is searching, collecting and entering data. These “lost” hours disappear like snow before the sun into the daily routine, because they simply don't show up as an expense on the balance sheet. Not because it is overlooked or someone forgot to add it to the cost sheet but because it is purely lost time. It does, however, cost you part of your IT budget!

How hidden IT costs escape your attention

While you focus on the big expense items and strategic IT projects, hidden IT costs sneak into your organization unnoticed. These incurred costs, call them losses if you will, are hardly ever monetized, so they rarely appear on the radar (read: the balance sheet). Employees are not likely to knock on your door complaining that they spend nearly two hours every day searching for information floating around in the organization. This waste of time may seem negligible when you zoom in on one employee, but in a company with a hundred employees the total waste amounts to a good thousand hours per week. The result: deadlines are pushed back, reporting becomes inaccurate, and you lose momentum against competitors – unless they are facing the same problem.

The price of fragmented systems and infrastructure

The longer a company operates, the more often you will see that over the years, "patchwork" type systems, intranets, shared folders and document management solutions often emerge. The original purpose of such tools was to simplify work processes, but the result is regularly the opposite: information becomes fragmented, difficult to find, and is often not fully up-to-date.

This, of course, also has to do with a company's IT policy. With the right vision, aimed at the optimal functioning of the organization, you can easily cope with the problems outlined above – especially if you acquire the right systems to make that possible. Easier said than done, especially if a company has been around for a long time. Sure, if a financial services company had had the opportunity to choose a fully equipped EIM system twenty years ago, it undoubtedly would have done so. But if you want your organization to function optimally, sometimes you have to be willing to look beyond just sticking the next "patch" on an outdated system as a solution. Especially when you consider the rapid developments in the field of Enterprise Information Management in recent years. You might very well avoid a lot of problems:

• Delayed projects: when employees waste valuable time searching, projects are unnecessarily delayed. When this happens frequently, it adds up to serious productivity losses.
• Quality loss: decisions are made based on incomplete or outdated data, reports contain errors, and analyses are less sharp.
• Job satisfaction under pressure: employees become frustrated when they often spend an unnecessary amount of time on trivial search work, which is reflected in less engagement and, in the longer term, possibly even a departure from the company.

What signals shouldn't you ignore?

How do you notice that these hidden IT costs are also affecting you or your organization? Of course, by now you know that you should be cautious when you regularly hear the question "Where is that document?". But project delays that occur without a clearly identifiable technical cause are also a clear signal. Signs of frustration and irritation with the available systems, whether it's digital asset management, document management, or some other type of system, are often a red flag. As small and insignificant as these signals may seem, they really do point to structural inefficiencies.

The first step: recognizing the problem

The good news is that being able to name the problem is already a big step toward solving it and reducing these invisible IT costs. Once you recognize that a significant portion of your week (and your IT budget) is being consumed by unnecessary search work, you can focus on solving the problem. Consider streamlining systems, implementing search functionality, or even centralizing information resources. That way, you take the first hurdle toward a more efficient, agile organization – a place where your team can excel at what really matters: innovating, improving and thinking ahead.