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There’s a time crisis happening around information findability. Multiple studies have found that knowledge workers waste nearly 20% of their workweek — about one full day — searching for the data or answers they need. Further, Microsoft's 2023 Work Trend Index found that 62% of employees said they spent too much time looking for information during the workday.
When looking for information, employees are typically searching for protocols and procedures, accessing training materials or looking for the right answer to their immediate questions. These priorities underscore the need for structured content, effective taxonomies and intentional knowledge transfer practices. For these and other reasons, 50% of organizations plan to focus on search and information findability, while 47% will focus on document management as part of their broad priorities around tools and infrastructure, according to Reworked research.
The bottom line: Employees need access to the right information in the right place at the right time. But too often, information is locked away or takes too long to uncover.
There’s plenty of room for improvement. According to Reworked research, only 45% of organizations say their digital workplace technologies are “integrated and optimized,” where their systems are well-architected, with a deliberate approach to integration, enterprise search, knowledge management and user experience.
But the way forward goes beyond mere document management — employees need the information locked within their documents more than they need to know which documents are where. Giving employees access to the right information at the right time starts with an understanding of what’s happening at organizations to prevent easy information findability and then addressing those pain points.
The Five Major Knowledge Management Pain Points for Organizations
Organizations face significant challenges in managing and accessing critical business information. Here are five persistent pain points that create operational bottlenecks across enterprises.
Fragmented Information
The most notable challenge to information retrieval involves scattered data across multiple platforms. Information is spread across emails, chats, PDFs, wikis, cloud systems and even offline, forcing employees to hunt through disconnected repositories to find the information they need. This fragmentation slows decision-making and diverts productive time toward searching for information rather than executing tasks.
Poor Results From Search Tools
Even with dedicated search capabilities, employees struggle to locate relevant, current information. Inconsistent tagging, outdated documents and weak metadata make search results unreliable. Users frequently encounter frustrating experiences when trying to retrieve specific information.
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Knowledge Retention Gaps
Critical expertise often remains trapped within individual employees or isolated teams, which threatens continuity. When people leave or change roles, organizations risk losing valuable institutional knowledge. This concentration of information creates vulnerability points that can disrupt operations, causing institutional knowledge loss when people move on to their next role.
Lack of Governance around Content Management
Duplicated, obsolete or poorly managed content clutters information repositories. Without regular audits and strong governance frameworks, employees can’t trust the accuracy of retrieved information. This uncertainty leads to decision-making delays and potential errors from using incorrect data.
Lack of System Scalability
Knowledge management solutions must adapt to organizational expansion, product changes and shifting priorities. Rigid systems that can’t scale or adapt quickly become operational bottlenecks, limiting organizational agility. Further, the rapid rise of AI tools in place demands better knowledge management than ever before. Information needs to be documented for AI to find and make use of it — information that’s in employees’ heads can’t help the organization scale with AI tools.
Solving Information Management
Addressing the pain points of knowledge management and findability takes dedication and the right tools to get information into employees’ hands. You’ll want solutions that do the following:
- Search smarter. Your tools should be able to search every nook and cranny and retrieve information no matter the document format.
- Display information in a unified UX. Solutions that standardize content across all your business applications make findability easier. A unified UX saves time by making it easier for your employees to ingest information, without having to stop and remember how to review information on that particular document type.
- Make governance easier. Your documents need to be secure as well as findable. Tools that offer governance controls for better security, traceability and protection allow information to still be found in tightly regulated industries.
- Be scalable. As organizations grow, their knowledge databases expand and fragment even further. You want a tool that scales with your business, to make information retrieval easy no matter the size or complexity of your operations.
Conclusion
Organizations are recognizing the value of internal knowledge and will be prioritizing budgets accordingly in the coming year. Many recognize that while information may be easily findable when the company is small, scaling that ease of findability will take careful planning and investment. After all, as organizations grow, scale and automate, the amount of knowledge they have increases and spreads out across documents, platforms, systems, processes — even humans. It’s up to organizations to reign in knowledge management and improve information findability, so employees can do their best work.
See how Uxopian Software can optimize your information management and retrieval at uxopian.com.
