If you think finding the information you need to do your job sounds like a simple enough task, you’d be wrong. Workers spend an inordinate amount of time simply searching for information in order to be able to do their jobs. Studies vary, but on balance, workers spend between 8 and 12 hours every single week on knowledge retrieval. Assuming a 40-hour work week, conservatively, workers spend 25% of their time trying to find the things they need to do their job. Today, that means public servants are spending one hour finding information they need to do three hours of work. It’s inefficient — and it’s no fault of the public servants. Technologically, critical information is fragmented and siloed within different systems across government agencies.
Kay Brooks, a policy and program analyst for the Oregon Housing and Community Services (OHCS), describes this push and pull as a fight between “the work to do the work and the work.” She says “the decentralization of resources results in a lot of duplication” because each government agency has its own Sharepoint, Teams chat, website, and information repositories that don’t talk to each other.
She’s not alone. One partner told us, “there are so many different programs out there. I want a way to quickly see how others are managing similar challenges; a search feature that lets me filter out all the noise.” Another said, “I spend too much time tracking down the right contacts or the right resources; it’d be helpful if all that information was in one central place and easy to find.”
Dana Carey, Senior Business Services Administrator at the Prince William County Department of Social Services, oversees the Continuum of Care (CoC) that includes Prince William County, echoes the sentiment: “Public servants on the front lines can’t sit there and check their email all the time. There were situations where important emails . . . were missed. It was just piecemeal. We didn’t have any way to know who was getting the information or who was reading it.”
Betsy Camara, a Pima County Heat Relief and Response Manager explains, “Before, we heard so often, ‘Oh, I can’t get into the Teams link’ or ‘I can’t find this resource or that document.’”
Camara continued: “With Roundtable, those concerns have more or less gone away.”
Amidst ongoing cost-cutting efforts at the federal level — efforts that are resulting in a decline in state budgets — it’s never been more important for government agencies at every level to operate effectively with fewer resources. Every dollar and hour saved through technology-powered efficiencies in government have a direct and positive correlation with service delivery to people who need it.
Based on a survey of Roundtable customers, the platform saves more than $6,500 per user, per year in efficiency gains by reducing the amount of time spent on knowledge retrieval. For an average state agency with 1,000 employees, that amounts to over $6.5 million a year.
These savings are realized by any agency on Roundtable — both our customers and the employees at partner organizations who work together in the platform.
“Ten out of ten times, users are taken to the right place to find the right information when they search,” Brian Leach, CIO and Director of Election Technology Services at South Carolina’s State Election Commission said. “Roundtable has enhanced our knowledge management capabilities; it’s one of the biggest benefits."
Here’s how:
Zooming out, it’s easy to see the savings are material. In a state like Texas, the savings are even more stark — with nearly two million state and local government employees, they’d save more than $12.5 billion a year, which would pay for Governor Abbott's public education package by nearly 1.5 times. As of 2024, New York State employed 761,200 people across state and local government agencies (source, source). If Roundtable was deployed across the state, they’d save ~$5 billion a year, which would pay for more than half of New York’s mass transit operating budget.
For the millions of state and local public servants across the country, Roundtable represents nearly $100 billion in cost savings — every single year. As municipal governments make impossibly hard choices about how to allocate taxpayer dollars responsibly, Roundtable shows that the right kinds of technology can result in meaningful savings that can be reattributed to other programs of need.
We can all agree that spending money on helping a veteran get the care they need, protecting people from a natural disaster, and helping someone experiencing homelessness find stable housing is a better use of taxpayer dollars than knowledge retrieval is.
There’s only one question left.
