Australian organisations may be paying a surprisingly high price for something that happens every day: people trying to find the information they need to do their jobs.
Research reported by ABC Business in August 2026 estimated that Australian knowledge workers spend more than 75 million hours each year searching for workplace messages, with the value of that lost time modelled at approximately $4.46 billion annually. The research also found that 28% of respondents searched across multiple platforms for a message every day, 52% struggled to find a particular email at least weekly, and 21% recreated work that a colleague had already completed at least once a week.
For asset managers, those findings should attract attention.
Because if searching for an email, message or document carries a productivity cost, the consequences of not being able to readily locate asset information can be considerably greater.
What does the research actually say?
The figures come from research undertaken by Australian/New Zealand workplace technology company Corro and reported by ABC Business on 18 August 2026.
The survey involved 500 respondents in each of Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the United States and Singapore. For Australia, the results were modelled across an estimated 6.3 million knowledge workers.
The ABC reported that the modelling estimated the average Australian worker loses around 12 hours each year searching for workplace messages. Across 6.3 million workers, this equates to more than 75 million hours.
The researchers then applied an estimated labour cost to those hours, producing the headline estimate of approximately $4.46 billion in lost productivity.
That figure needs to be treated appropriately. It is not $4.46 billion of expenditure identified in company accounts, nor is it an independently measured national productivity loss. It is an economic estimate based on survey responses and modelling assumptions. ABC Business noted that different assumptions could produce an estimated cost ranging from approximately $2.7 billion to $6.2 billion.
There is another important qualification: Corro provides technology intended to address fragmented workplace communications, giving it a commercial interest in the issue being researched. ABC Business explicitly acknowledged this when reporting the findings.
Nevertheless, the underlying issue is difficult to dismiss: when organisational information is fragmented across multiple systems and is difficult to locate, people spend productive time searching, recreating information or making decisions without all of the information available to them.
And Corro is not alone in identifying the problem. Atlassian’s State of Teams 2025, based on a survey of 12,000 knowledge workers and 200 executives, found that teams and leaders estimated they spent around 25% of their time searching for answers. Atlassian also reported that information is frequently trapped in organisational silos, making collaboration and decision-making more difficult.
The studies measure different things and their figures should therefore not be directly compared or combined. What they do demonstrate is a recurring organisational problem: having information somewhere is not the same as having information available when it is needed.
For asset managers, the issue goes much further than finding an email
Asset-intensive organisations depend on information throughout the asset lifecycle.
An engineer deciding whether an asset should remain in service may need condition information, inspection records, failure history and operating data.
A maintenance planner may need the current asset hierarchy, maintenance strategy, work history, drawings, spare parts information and criticality classification.
An investment committee considering asset renewal may need deterioration forecasts, lifecycle costs, risk information, demand forecasts and asset performance data.
A field technician may need the correct drawing, specification or maintenance instruction.
And executives approving millions of dollars of capital investment need confidence that the information supporting the business case reflects the assets that actually exist and their current condition, performance and risk.
If that information takes hours to locate — or if several conflicting versions exist — the organisation is paying a search cost.
But there can also be a much larger decision cost.
The real cost of poor asset information
In an asset management context, the consequences of inaccessible, fragmented or unreliable information can include:
- employees spending time searching across EAM/CMMS systems, document management systems, spreadsheets, shared drives, email and individual files;
- duplicate inspections, analysis or engineering work because previous work cannot be located;
- maintenance undertaken using superseded drawings or asset information;
- incorrect asset strategies based on incomplete failure or condition histories;
- unnecessary site visits to verify information that should already be held digitally;
- difficulty identifying why previous investment or maintenance decisions were made;
- inconsistent asset identifiers between engineering, operational and financial systems;
- reduced confidence in asset registers;
- slower preparation of business cases and investment submissions;
- poor prioritisation of renewal and maintenance expenditure; and
- decisions made using assumptions because reliable information cannot be found quickly enough.
These are not simply IT inconveniences.
They affect the fundamental asset management balance between cost, risk and performance.
The Asset Management Council has previously highlighted research indicating that many asset managers lack confidence in their organisations’ asset information, with implications for areas including safety, compliance, customer outcomes and financial sustainability.
ISO 55001:2024 makes the connection explicit
The importance of information to asset management is reflected strongly in the latest edition of ISO 55001:2024 – Asset management — Asset management system — Requirements.
The 2024 revision places increased emphasis on asset management decision-making, data, information and organisational knowledge. ISO/TC 251 identifies Data and Information and Knowledge as specific areas strengthened in the revised standard and highlights the role of data and information as a basis for asset management decision-making.
Clause 7.6 requires organisations to determine the data and information required to support asset management. This can include information necessary for decision-making, risk management, lifecycle management, performance reporting and meeting legal, regulatory and stakeholder requirements.
Organisations are also expected to establish requirements covering matters such as the quality and source of information and to plan for its collection, integration, improvement and sharing.
This is an important distinction.
Good asset information management is not about accumulating as much data as possible.
It is about ensuring that the right information, of the right quality, can be found by the right person at the right time to support the right decision.
Search time can be a symptom of a larger problem
There is a temptation to address information retrieval problems simply by adding better search technology. That may help, but asset managers should first ask why the search is difficult.
- Is information spread across too many systems?
- Are asset naming conventions inconsistent?
- Is there a common asset hierarchy?
- Are drawings properly linked to the relevant assets?
- Are multiple versions of the same information being maintained?
- Is ownership of critical data defined?
- Are data quality requirements known?
- Can employees distinguish authoritative information from working information?
- Can financial and engineering information be reconciled?
- Is information captured when assets are designed, constructed, commissioned and modified — or is somebody expected to reconstruct it years later?
These are asset management and governance questions, not merely technology questions.
An organisation can implement increasingly sophisticated analytics, digital twins and artificial intelligence, but those tools ultimately depend upon the information environment beneath them.
As Atlassian has observed in its own research on knowledge management, adding AI over poorly organised information does not automatically solve the underlying problem.
For asset-intensive organisations, this principle is particularly important. AI can find patterns in data remarkably quickly. It cannot make an incorrect asset hierarchy correct, recreate a missing inspection, determine which of three undocumented drawings represents the asset in the field, or automatically establish the business meaning of poorly governed data.
A useful question for asset managers
There is a simple experiment organisations can undertake. Choose several routine asset management questions, such as:
- What is the current condition of this asset?
- When was it last inspected?
- What maintenance has been performed on it?
- What is its remaining useful life?
- Which drawing represents its current configuration?
- What risk does its failure create?
- Why was its renewal deferred last year?
Then measure how long it takes an appropriately authorised person to find a reliable answer, supported by traceable information.
If answering a basic asset question requires searching several applications, asking three colleagues, opening spreadsheets stored in personal folders and checking whether a PDF drawing is the latest revision, the organisation has identified an information-management problem worthy of attention.
Multiply that activity across thousands of employees, millions of assets and decades of asset life, and even small information inefficiencies become significant.
Asset information is an organisational capability
The headline that Australian organisations could be losing billions of dollars as employees search for information is attention-grabbing. The precise number is debatable but the management issue behind it is not.
For asset managers, information should be considered part of the infrastructure through which effective asset management is delivered.
Organisations should therefore be asking not only:
Do we have the data? but:
- Can people find it?
- Can they understand it?
- Can they trust it?
- Is it current?
- Is it connected to the asset and decision it supports?
- Can its source be traced?
- And are we maintaining that information throughout the life of the asset?
Improving those capabilities can reduce administrative effort, but the potential value is much greater than simply saving search time.
Reliable and accessible asset information supports better maintenance decisions, stronger investment planning, more transparent risk decisions, better lifecycle management and greater confidence that organisational resources are being directed to the assets that create the greatest value.
In that sense, the cost of searching for information is only the visible part of the problem.
For asset-intensive organisations, the greater question may be:
What is the cost of the decisions we make when the information cannot be found at all?
References and further reading
- ABC News / ABC Business, Daniel Ziffer, 18 August 2026, Australians ‘spend’ $4 billion annually searching for work messages. Reports Corro research and provides the survey methodology and qualifications surrounding the $4.46 billion modelling estimate.
- Atlassian, State of Teams 2025. Research based on 12,000 knowledge workers and 200 executives examining information search, organisational silos and collaboration.
- ISO, ISO 55001:2024 — Asset management — Asset management system — Requirements. Second edition, published July 2024.
- ISO/TC 251, Key changes in ISO 55001:2024. Explains the increased emphasis on asset management decision-making, data and information, knowledge and lifecycle management.
- Asset Management Council, ISO 55001:2024 Companion Guide — 7.6 Data and Information. Overview of the data and information requirements of ISO 55001:2024.