I read a blog post on IBM developerWorks about how social tagging saved the company $millions. As background:

“The Enterprise Tagging Service in IBM aims to provide an alternative approach to helping people find information compared to traditional search engines… Social tagging allows people to add human semantics to keywords that they define that sometimes can amount to finding a resource faster based on what people think is relevant…IBM’s ETS cost $700k to develop and deploy across the worldwide intranet as a sidebar to a number of key web properties… Readers can tag any page with the widget, look up tags they contributed, find others who have used the same tag, and certainly find other relevant resources by that same tag.”

And here’s the best part:
“The ETS team instituted a survey to ask users how this tool helped them. What they found was amazing when you look at it in context: the average person saved 12 seconds, across the 286000+ searches performed through ETS each week. This sums up to 955 hours saved each week across the company. In terms of cost savings, it amounts to a rough estimate of $4.6 million a year, in terms of productivity gain.”

It’s great to see companies like IBM adopt tagging and other social media approaches to increase productivity–it shows that there is indeed hope that the enterprise will catch on! But, what is surprising is that they are so pleased with a 12 second improvement in searching–since the problem and opportunity is so much bigger than that. Remember from previous posts in this blog:

“IDC research indicates that knowledge workers spend 15-30% of their time seeking specific information and these searches are successful less than 50% of the time. For the Fortune 500, the cost of the fruitless searches represents between $60 and $85 billion in direct costs and twice that in opportunity costs.”

If we assume 20% as the average time people spend looking for info, that equates to one entire work day per week, or a whopping 10 weeks per person per year. That single 8-hour day multiplies out to 28,800 seconds per day, compared to the 12 seconds saved per search. If we assume that people on average make 20 searches today (I’m making this up, but it seems reasonable), each person would save a total of 4 entire minutes per day, or 20 minutes per week–which is 4.2% of the total time searching! I’m all for social tagging and I agree we should all include it in our arsenal–but it is clearly a very weak weapon to help us win the productivity war.

But, imagine if you could search knowledge down to the spoken word, access it at the exact point of interest, and have it all available in your favorite digital media formats (streaming, downloadable, mobile). And then imagine, after finding a knowledge nugget of interest, you could find the expert/author, see all of that person’s work, ask the person a salient question, follow the person’s future contributions, and be able to find, join and participate in the same communities of interest! Now that is a huge improvement–and that is the power of Collaborative Knoweldge Sharing.

The jury is finally back and the verdict is not what anyone wants to hear—the information technology revolution has failed us. After spending untold $billions over the last two decades on computer hardware and software, knowledge workers today still spend 15-30% of their time looking for the information they need to do their work—and find what they are looking for less than half the time! Who could have possibly imagined at the end of the first decade of the 21st century that individuals would still be spending 10 weeks or more per year looking for the information they need at work and still not be able to find it? And this dismal result after installing an endless number of three-letter acronym systems: ERP, CRM, CMS, DAM, DMS, LMS, etc., etc.—not to mention the explosive adoption of the Internet, Google, and countless other tools for creating and finding enterprise content.

I’m told the definition of insanity is continuing to do the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. How many more $billions do we need to spend over how many more decades to realize something is seriously amiss here? When are we going to understand that a change in thinking and approach is needed to address the single biggest productivity challenge organizations face? Fortunately, the convergence of video, search, web 2.0 and social networking has resulted in the emergence of a trend that that is overcoming the limitations of traditional approaches and is reducing this enterprise productivity gap for a number for global companies—Collaborative Knowledge Sharing. The Info Technology Revolution Has Failed Us

After a very long hiatus from blogging, I decided as one of my New Year’s resolutions to start it up again. The reasons for ceasing were many, foremost of which was that my obligations as CEO sapped my energy to write about what was going on. But, we have built a great team at Altus over the last few years and many of my previous day-to-day responsibilities are now being handily managed by others more capable than myself. And the reasons for starting up again? I strongly believe that the current financial crisis that is so negatively impacting companies small and large today actually poses a tremendous opportunity for those of us in the collaborative knowledge sharing space–if only we understand how to take advantage of that opportunity (more to come on this critical point in the future). And times have dramatically evolved in many other ways in the last few years (for the better I believe!)–hence the change in the name of this blog from Rapid elearning News to Collaborative Knowledge Sharing. I didn’t start a new blog, since much of what has been said here is as true today as it was a few years ago–and the points made then continue to serve as a s strong foundation and background for what will be said here in the months ahead. And the focus of the blog will change, from the general to the specific—from reflections on the learning industry in general to what is actually happening on the street, in Altus Learning Systems, delivering CKS solutions to many of today’s most advanced, technology-based, global companies.