Information disorder affects 40 per cent of Australian and New Zealand organizations, a report by Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) released on Wednesday said.

The 40 per cent represents a 5 per cent increase over the past two years.

The report pinpointed to insufficient IT manpower and budgets, and too much data as the reasons behind the information glut. HDS warned that growth and mismanagement of digital information could affect the national productivities of the two Oceania nations.

The study estimated that the cost of corporate inaction is at $3 billion a year. The amount is based on research made by AMR and Deloitte Access Economics.

Although 90 per cent of Australian enterprises admit that the volume of data they have to handle have gone up, the percentage of those that said they have enough IT budgets to take care of future expansion went down to 13 per cent from 50 per cent. Another 11 per cent said it could not even cope with current challenges.

Among the indicators of information glut are higher operation expenses which was reported by 49 per cent of Aussies businesses included in the study, inability to recover key files (38 per cent), difficulty in meeting reporting requirements (22 per cent), sales decline or inability to get business (17 per cent) and damage to reputation (11 per cent).

Despite the information glut, only 51 per cent of the organizations have a company-owned social media presence and only 33 per cent use Twitter. Another 37 per cent use some form of cloud storage.

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