I’ve been watching statistics like this ever since I started in the BPM/document management field over 15 years ago, and they never seem to really go away. These ones were published by AIIM earlier this year:
400 Hours — Number of hours per year the average employee spends searching for paper documents. (Source: Datapro/Gartner Group)
$6 – $12 Million — The amount the typical enterprise with 1,000 knowledge workers wastes per year per year searching for nonexistent information, failing to find existing information, or recreating information that cannot be found. (Source: IDG)
25 Percent — Percentage of enterprise paper documents that are misplaced and will never be located. (Source: Datapro/Gartner Group)
The last one puts me in mind of a contract that I did a few years back for a manufacturing organization. A very old company, they were converting their engineering drawings (some dating back 100 years) and aperature cards [a pre-historic storage medium that consisted of a piece of microfiche embedded in a computer-readable punched card containing the indexing information] to scanned images, eventually to be redrawn as CAD files, and implementing some basic change request and approval workflow. I had an internal company email address, as I often do when working with customers, and one day was copied on the following mass internal email:
Found: an aperture card, reference #xxxxxx, on the road between building A and building B.
You can be pretty sure that this is one of the misplaced ones.