Employees having to search for data they need to do their jobs costs businesses precious manhours. (Image source: 123RF)
Organisations are losing an entire workday each week due to employees spending time searching for information needed to do their jobs, which is a growing concern, warns technology consultancy CMPNY.
The consultancy cites research by global document management and workflow solutions firm Synergis, which claims employees spend up to 8.8 hours a week looking for data that exists somewhere within the business.
Thabang Chukura, CEO of CMPNY, says: “Organisations generate growing volumes of training content, customer onboarding sessions, webinars, product demonstrations and internal knowledge-sharing recordings. Yet, despite the explosion of content, many businesses continue to struggle to make that knowledge accessible when employees and customers need it most.
“Organisations are producing more institutional knowledge than ever, ranging from internal presentations and product demos, to Zoom walkthroughs and screen recordings, all supplemented by a growing surge of AI-generated material. The problem is that the primary tools used to create this content were never really designed for group retrieval,” says Chukura.
He says McKinsey estimates that knowledge workers spend 1.8 hours per day (about 9.3 hours per week) searching for information.
“This leads to what we call ‘dark content’, or high-value knowledge that remains structurally hidden,” says Chukura. “For example, a detailed integration walkthrough recorded by a senior engineer might sit unnoticed in a cloud folder. When that individual leaves, the knowledge goes with them because no one knew the resource existed.”
According to the CMPNY CEO, three factors compound the problem: tools do not integrate effectively, leaving knowledge fragmented; no single team owns the issue, as it sits between IT, HR and operations; and informal sharing works at small scale but breaks down as organisations grow.
As headcount increases, knowledge can be lost if a culture of properly indexing content has not been established.
The issue has become more pronounced as video has emerged as the preferred format for knowledge transfer across many organisations, Chukura adds.
“Teams record customer meetings, implementation workshops, training sessions and product walkthroughs every day, creating extensive knowledge libraries that often remain underutilised.”
While access to available data is the core issue, another challenge is the time support teams spend assisting employees and customers, he says.
“When employees cannot find information quickly, support teams are forced to answer the same questions repeatedly, onboarding processes take longer, and customers become dependent on manual support channels for answers that may already exist elsewhere in the organisation. Valuable expertise remains trapped inside recordings instead of being available to the people who need it.”
Misunderstanding the problem
Chukura says businesses often assume they need to create more content to solve the problem. “In reality, many organisations already possess the information their teams and customers are looking for. One of the biggest misconceptions is that existing content is not polished or professional enough to be useful.
“Businesses assume they need to invest in new training programmes, new documentation or new content creation projects when they often already have hours of valuable expertise sitting in recorded demonstrations, onboarding sessions and customer workshops.”
“Some of the most effective training content comes from power users and product specialists doing their jobs. These are the people who understand the software best, answer customer questions every day and know where users typically get stuck. The value is not in producing another webinar or another training session; the value is in making the knowledge you already have accessible, searchable and usable,” he adds.
Judgement turns to business value
Loraine Vorster, VP for Sub-Saharan Africa at the Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA), says organisations are not short of knowledge, but of ways to find and use it.
“Think about a company that has spent years recording onboarding sessions, customer demonstrations, technical workshops and internal training. The expertise is there, but it’s often spread across video recordings, shared drives, e-mails, Teams chats and knowledge bases that don’t easily connect. As a result, employees spend time recreating work, asking colleagues the same questions or solving problems that someone else solved months ago,” says Vorster.
“The business impact is significant. Productivity suffers, onboarding takes longer, customer issues take longer to resolve, and valuable expertise remains locked away instead of benefiting the wider organisation.”
She says AI can help unlock this information. “AI has enormous potential to help organisations unlock the knowledge they already have. It can transcribe meetings, summarise discussions, recommend relevant resources and allow employees to ask natural-language questions instead of searching through dozens of folders or documents.”
AI can support onboarding, continuous learning and skills-gap identification, but access to information is not the same as competence, Vorster continues.
“Employees still need judgement and experience to apply it correctly. The most effective organisations will pair AI tools with ongoing skills development, ensuring knowledge is discoverable and usable while capability continues to grow.
“Before investing heavily in creating new content, organisations should first identify what knowledge already exists and make it easier to discover. At the same time, businesses shouldn’t assume that searchable information replaces structured learning. AI can point someone to the right video or document, but it cannot replace the deeper understanding that comes from developing skills and experience. Information is available in seconds; capability still takes time to build.”
