The admission by a former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, that “if only HP knew what HP knows, we would be three times more productive” underlines the difficulties of managing information within a company.

Lew Platt made that remark 15 years ago. Since then, the problem of knowing who is doing what within a large corporation - and whether it is accessing the data essential to its business - has become more acute as advances in technology, in turn, bring a flood of information.

Organisations often overlook the dangers of wasting resources by duplicating work and of missing out on vital developments.

“It is important for companies to develop communities that allow people across the organisation to communicate together to share experiences and insights,” said Professor Harry Scarbrough, of Warwick Business School. “Proactive companies are developing ‘expertise finders’, a sort of corporate Yellow Pages to tell them who knows what rather than who does what.”

Owain Dobson, principal consultant for BT Professional Services, said: “An increasing number of people share information about what they are doing on social networking sites. Business people list their CVs, skills and projects on LinkedIn. Companies need to capitalise on these trends to create corporate facebooks while protecting commercially sensitive information.

“I want to be able to develop informal relationships between companies. Too many firms are obsessed with building walls around themselves but, if the walls are too strong, staff will go outside to share information and then firms won’t know what’s going on.”

Just as important as sharing information is making sure that all relevant data is picked up.

“If you put rubbish into a search engine, you will get rubbish back,” Mr Dobson said. “We are developing a system that narrows a search, step by step, to lead you to precisely to what you need.”

Professor Scarbrough said: “There is so much random noise out there that is not relevant. Companies must exploit information and not just be passive recipients of it.

If they gather information that is available to everyone else in the world, it will have no special value. “They need to be able to access information that is not available to others and interpret it efficiently.”

Sources can range from industry-specific intelligence bulletins to friends on the golf course. A recent survey found that nonexecutive directors, free of conflicts of interest within a company, are useful providers of unexpected information.

Advances in technology that enable users to collaboratively edit material are guiding organisations through the minefield of modern data. These collaborative technologies are helping to cut costs and improve efficiency.

Wayne Matus, a partner at the law firm Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman, said that some firms were so obsessive about keeping documents that they still had sales records from the 19th century and dinner menus from the 1920s.

“What is essential is a proper corporate record retention policy, which identifies the categories of documents needed for business and required by law. From a discovery perspective, the cost of litigation is directly proportional to the number of documents lawyers must read, so if the mass of materials can be reduced, the client saves.”