Information glut spreading, says Hitachi

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 29 November 2011 00:05

Business IT - Technology

The failure to properly manage and use the growing volume of digital data is costing the economy billions of dollars each year, according to new Australian research.

'Information glut' - the effect of an unmanageable rise in information within an organisation - is affecting the productivity of Australian organisations to the tune of $3 billion per year, according to Hitachi Data Systems (HDS).

Adrian De Luca, chief technologist at HDS Australia and New Zealand, told iTWire that the company first examined the issue of information glut with a survey of 450 organisations in 2009. This year, the goal was to look at the impact it was having on organisations and on the economy as a whole.

95% of respondents to a survey carried out for the company by AMR said their organisation suffered from information glut to some extent - an increase of five percentage points over the 2009 results. One quarter said it was having a significant effect on organisational performance.

HDS also engaged Deloitte Access Economics to determine the impact of information glut on productivity. In this context, productivity losses include time wasted locating documents and files stored in various systems as well as transferring (copying and pasting, or re-entering) information between documents.

Deloitte's modelling showed that productivity gains from improved information handling as reported in a survey could, under two scenarios, increase Australia's GDP by 0.21% to 0.30% in 2011, reducing to 0.18% to 0.35% by 2020. That gives a net present value between more than $19 billion to almost $28 billion, or around $3 billion to $4 billion per year.

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