This document discusses putting a monetary value on information assets within an organization. It provides a formula to calculate the value of information created by employees, which is estimated at £12,600,000 for an organization with 1200 employees. It also notes that organizations should invest around £96,000 in search and discovery support staff to ensure their information assets can be found and used. Further reading links are provided on measuring the value of information and the costs of poor information discovery.

1. Putting a value on your
information assets
Intranet Now 2017
Martin White, Intranet Focus Ltd
www.intranetfocus.com
Create Store Discover Use Share Review

2. #IntranetNow

3. Create
Store
Discover
Use
Share
Review
Record
Dispose
The information lifecycle
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4. Create
Store
Discover
If the Discovery processes are ineffective then the
ability of the firm to use and share information are
significantly reduced
Information becomes invisible
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5. #IntranetNow
Could this happen in your organisation?

6. Putting a value on information assets
• The assumptions
• Everyone with access to your intranet spends at least 10% of their working
day creating, reviewing and revising information
• Reports, memos, policies, standards, guidelines, news, comments etc
• An indicative salary for people creating this content is £45,000 and with
overheads that costs your organisation £70,000 a year
• Information has a one year half-life, so that only half the information created
a year ago still has a value to the organisation
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7. The formula
• Say your organisation has 1200 people using the intranet
• Divide by 10 because if 10% of their time is spent creating
information that is the equivalent of 120 employees full time
• Multiply by 1.5 to allow for the information half-life factor over two
years, so that is 180
• Multiply by 7 as the first stage of working out the time/salary, which
brings the number to 1260
• Multiple by 10,000 to bring the 7 up to £70,000
• £12,600,000 is the final number
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8. Some comments
• I suspect that the 10% figure is low and that overall the figure understates the asset value. If they
are only working at a 10% level on information creation what are they doing for the other 90%
• This is not an officially auditable figure but it is worth comparing the about with other assets on
the organisation’s balance sheet
• The main purpose is to balance the investment your organisation has made in creating
information with the level of investment it has made in being able to find information
• If you use SharePoint the argument will be that search is a sunk cost. In terms of capital
investment that might be the case but you need at least two full time staff (one from the business
and one from IT) on making sure that the search application is working well.
• See the chart on the next slide
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9. A guide to search team investment
This chart appears in Making Search Work, found at
intranetfocus.com/resources/research-notes/ and
directly at
intranetfocus.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Making-
Search-Work-Intranet-Focus-April-2017.pdf [PDF; 1.7MB]
So if you have 1200 people you should be
Investing around $90/£80 per person in support
staff, or £96,000. Then there is a chance that
£12M of information assets will become visible
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10. Further reading
• The high cost of not finding information
• http://www.ejitime.com/materials/IDC%20on%20The%20High%20Cost%20Of%20Not%20Finding%20Information.pdf
• Measuring the value of information (dates from 1993)
• https://www.researchgate.net/publication/224102163_Measuring_the_Value_of_Information_The_Information-Intensive_Organization
• What does your information really cost
• http://www.dovetail.events/media/What%20Does%20Your%20Information%20Really%20Cost.pdf
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