My news reader just popped up this article (possibly as a result of your rebuilding the blog).

The struggle I have with these quantifications is that it makes the assumption that 100% "efficiency" of all workers is a good thing.

A different question to ask to help quantify the problem is what can’t we do as a result of this problem? What is it that the knowledge workers can’t do? What does that take away from the business that people can’t find what they are looking for? Why were they looking for it in the first place? What is the real problem?

The discussion of these kinds of questions can lead down some very different paths. Do we need a better job of educating people on information literacy (and storage and search)? Do we need to get people talking to each other? Do we need to redesign the workplace? Do we need a better search technology? Do we need better metadata? Does the stuff exist to begin with? Better display or visualization of results?