One of the most significant challenges in today's knowledge work is to deal with explosion of "Information Overload". The saving of workers time in searching, accessing, and filtering the vast amount of information scattered across personal desktop, shared workspace, and enterprise repositories can be measured and potentially translated to hard-savings in workspace.

In the age of industry evaluation, we measure productivities by yields and through-put of the workers on the assembly lines. It is a bit harder to measure the productivities in the information age as knowledge work performed today as less mechanical and procedural in nature. Some type of work such as research and development can be measured by number of patents, number of design iterations, and product development lead times.

As an example, according to an IDC study, a knowledge work spends around an average of 9.5 hours per week searching for information. Based on the average salary plus benefits of $60,000/year from Department of Labor (2005), this would translate to $14,251.90 a year per worker. With improved enterprise search, there are two possible out-comes depends on the nature of the work. The knowledge workers can reduced the amount of the time spent on search for information. Or the they might actually spent the same or even more time on searching but discover more relevant information which results in improvements in the quality of the job deliverables. In the first case, a saving 10% of the time (1 hour per week) can be translated into potential saving of $1,425 a year per worker. If we only effected a 10% of the knowledge worker population at Ford, that would a saving of 3,000 x $1,425 = $4,275,000. Can this be translated to reduced workforce in term salary and benefits paid? Probably not, but we can safely say it would positively impacted the business bottom line indirectly through better work through-put, increased quality, and improved morale (reduced stressed at work). The second scenario is much harder to measure. If a research scientist can find a new connections among previously unknown facts due to improved search performance, the impact of productivity gain can be measured by new patents and innovate products that changes the competitive landscape in the industry. As we can tell, the benefits of various technologies on productivities can be measured directly through the amount of time saved. But the impacts are far more indirect and potentially very significant.

As you can see, there is a lot of "IF" statements. To a large degree, The numbers are anecdotal but yet very convincing to reflect the order of magnitude of the positive impact. Like other strategic investments, such as Knowledge Management, the returns are mixed with multitude of other internal and external factors when it comes to impact on bottom line. In a business environment of doing more with less, productivity improvement is not a "nice to have" but a basic element for survival.