-Jon Horden, CEO,iKVA
Data professionals spend 30% of their time searching for, governing and preparing data each week. A further 20% of their time is spent duplicating work. However, productivity is a challenge faced by more than just data professionals.
Communication siloes between remote and hybrid teams, the rapid growth of unstructured data in organisations and shrinking workforces have all increased the amount of time that is spent by individuals searching for essential knowledge to complete tasks.
The growing trend for remote and hybrid working in the UK has led to increasing collaboration via platforms such as Zoom, Teams and instant messaging apps. Multiple channels are being used to communicate business updates and decisions, but the blurred knowledge sharing process has led to an explosion of unstructured data that is being stored in different systems and in different formats, making it difficult to access relevant information easily.
Economic recession means that organisations are navigating challenges in both recruitment and retention and, the combination of new employees who are unfamiliar with existing knowledge sources and unpreserved knowledge, lost through redundancies or resignations,is impacting workplace productivity by making it more difficult to access important information.
AI-based software processes data more than 1,000 times faster than humans can, with consistency and accuracy, and has the potential to reduce the burden of labour and time intensive processes to optimise asset management. By automating the mundane task of data preparation and delivering essential information into an employee’s workflow, useful gains can be made in workplace productivity.
Reduce time searching for information
On average, employees spend over eight hours per week – an entire workday – searching for and acquiring information: finding relevant data from the large volumes of siloed information, dispersed across an organisation, can be a difficult and labour intensive task. The number of teams working remotely and in different geographical locations is further compounding the problem of accessing crucial information; individuals are waiting for colleagues to provide information that has been created and stored somewhere else within an organisation. Often these waits are extended across time zones.
Many of the channels being used to generate and store information do not have search interfaces and, with no mechanism for easy discovery, the majority of current retrieval systems rely on keyword searches. These systems enable users to combine words and modifiers to retrieve relevant information, but often yield irrelevant results as the search parameters are so large and there is a lack of context.
This is where emerging AI-enabled knowledge management tools, such as iKVA’s, can help by indexing unstructured data, across millions of sources, before collating it in one accessible place and proactively serving up insight to users when, and where, they need it, in milliseconds. This enables employees to discover knowledge quickly and efficiently, which improves their productivity and reduces the pressure on an organisation’s resources.
New cloud-based software solutions can be instantly implemented and integrated with existing workflow systems. This removes the need to source specialised employees and contractors at a time when more organisations are faced with making redundancies as well as costly upgrades to the legacy systems that are still frequently used.
Improve financial outcomes
AI software solutions empower teams with more knowledge than ever before by providing them with a searchable knowledge base that includes information they might not even have known existed. By empowering decision makers with a full and transparent overview of available data, they will be well-placed to make business critical decisions.
The financial benefits of AI technology extend beyond improved decision-making. Many Chief Technology Officers are now confronted with the challenge of growing volumes of data with soaring data costs. The average cost of storing just one terabyte of data – equivalent to 500 hours of zoom video calls – is now estimated to be£2,749 per year. Businesses can leverage AI technology to discover and grant employee saccessto valuable existing information while identifying irrelevant data that can be removed to reduce the cost of cloud or server storage and corresponding energy costs.
Remain competitive in a recession
AI technology offers organisations the opportunity to significantly reduce the time it takes to find information, saving precious time and making it easier for employees to perform their roles. By integrating AI tools into the workflows, businesses will reduce the financial and environmental burden of storing unstructured data, empower their employees with an enhanced collective knowledge base and improve productivity across their workforces.
