Workers Waste Time on Doc Management

How much time do you spend creating, approving and distributing documents? Apparently, too much, according to a recent survey conducted by IDC and sponsored by Adobe. In fact, IDC estimates that unproductive document-related time spent by information workers costs organizations nearly $20,000 a year for each employee. For an organization with 1,000 professionals, that equates to hiring 213 new workers. "Information work is inherently document-intensive," writes Melissa Webster, author of the whitepaper that accompanies the survey findings. "Much of the time that information workers spend involves [dealing] with documents or forms in one way or another—whether researching and pulling information together for documents; reviewing, approving and signing documents; managing the document review process; or working with forms and forms data." An estimated 1,200 global information and IT professionals took part in the research.