“If you can’t measure it…you can’t manage it”
Peter Drucker

Often in business, we overlook what we think are “small” issues. The reality is they tally up to be a “BIG” issues. Rarely do we stop to measure the amounts of time our staff invest in mundane tasks across their working week. Meetings, slow Internet connections, awaiting decisions and attempting to keep all staff in the communications loop.

We thought we’d run a test

What is a really important thing to measure in any business? We came up with this proposition.

Shorten the time it takes to make a business decision. Get more decisions made in a day.

We devised a simple test to measure this – Total Time to enable a decision. Let’s examine a typical office scenario. One that is repeated many times throughout the course of a day.

You have a 15 Mb file. You need to send it to a colleague to get a decision.

Scenario 1 – Email

We attached the 15 Mb file to an email and sent it. It took 9.5 minutes to leave my computer and it took 3 minutes to download and appear on my colleagues screen.

Total Time to enable a decision = 12.5 minutes

Scenario 2 – CORUS

(Standard internet hosted version)
We uploaded the 15 Mb file to a topic on CORUS. It took 2 minutes to upload and 1 minute to download and appear on my colleagues screen.

Total Time to enable a decision = 3 minutes

Scenario 3 – CORUS

(Enterprise hosted version)
We uploaded the 15 Mb file to a topic on CORUS. This time to an Enterprise local version (on our local network). The file was uploaded and on my colleagues screen in 11 seconds.

Total Time to enable a decision = 11 seconds

Say this happens 5 times a day in an office with 100 staff.

Scenario 1 – Email 5 x 100 x 12.5 minutes = 104 hours lost in making 500 decisions per day
Scenario 2 - CORUS 5 x 100 x 3 minutes = 25 hours lost in making 500 decisions per day
Scenario 3 – CORUS (Enterprise) 5 x 100 x 11 seconds = 1.5 hours lost in making 500 decisions per day

To recap. We started with the proposition. Shorten the time it takes to make a business decision. Get more decisions made in a day.

We devised and ran a simple test. Against the benchmark of sending files via email, a business with 100 staff could have up to an extra 100 hours per day or one hour extra per staff member to make decisions.

That’s of course if you used CORUS as a decision support tool.

Unblock your decision making. Try it.