Yes they are. Employee productivity is adversely affected by a lack of information governance (IG) in two ways. First, without IG, employees spend time “managing” their work files, contacts, emails and attachments. This management time includes reviewing content, deciding whether a particular file or email should be kept or deleted, deciding how long required emails will be kept and where, and finally, moving these files to their final storage location. Many research organizations and experts have stated that this content management time is estimated to consume anywhere from two to four hours per week. Consider a conservative example of two hours per week for this activity: this translates to 104 hours per year per employee or, for an organization of 5,000 employees, 520,000 hours per year devoted to individually managing data – that may or may not have been performed efficiently or effectively.

A second measure of lost employee productivity is in the number of hours per week that employees spend searching for information within the enterprise. Organizations without a centrally managed information management capability usually don’t actively manage employee file shares. When searchable central indexes are not available, employees fall back on simple keyword searches – which rarely produce the results the employee is looking for in a timely manner, if at all. In some cases, stored information might not be found due to weak or incorrect search terms, poor file naming, or the fact that the file wasn’t actually saved at all (i.e. the employee just thought it was).

This lack of information management can cost an organization a great deal and not even realize it.