Knowledge for All: How Atlassian and Rovo Are Solving the Hidden Cost of Lost Information

Picture this: it’s 4 PM on a Friday and you’re scrambling to find a report for a critical client meeting. You search your email, comb through shared drives, scroll endless chat threads – precious minutes tick by. We’ve all been there, hunting for information that should be at our fingertips but somehow isn’t. This everyday scavenger hunt isn’t just frustrating; it’s expensive. In fact, nearly one full day each week is wasted as employees search for information instead of doing productive work. That’s time not spent serving customers, innovating new ideas, or closing deals – and it adds up in a big way.

The High Cost of Not Finding Information Quickly

The hourglass with dollar signs illustrates the ~30% of a knowledge worker’s day that can be spent searching for information – time that translates to significant lost productivity. When employees can’t quickly find what they need, they lose momentum and companies lose money. Multiple studies show that knowledge workers spend 20–30% of their workday simply looking for information. Put another way, businesses hire five employees but only four are doing actual work; the fifth might as well be digging through files in the loft. This wasted effort carries a staggering price tag – for a 1,000-person organisation, all that unproductive search time can cost around $25 million per year in lost output. It’s not just about time and money: when people finally do find what they need, it might be outdated or inconsistent, leading to mistakes and poor decisions.

The damage doesn’t stop there. Siloed knowledge means teams often duplicate work because they weren’t aware someone else already solved the same problem. One aerospace company discovered engineers in different divisions had been unknowingly working on identical issues, wasting effort on redundant projects – a problem that experts estimate costs companies millions more each year. Important decisions get delayed while employees chase down data across countless apps and platforms. Morale suffers as professionals feel like they’re spinning their wheels. In short, not being able to find information quickly creates a drag on the entire organisation, increasing costs and reducing efficiency at every turn.

Knowledge for All: A Strategy for Success

So how do we fix this? The solution starts with a simple but powerful idea: “knowledge for all.” A knowledge for all strategy means breaking down information silos and making knowledge accessible to everyone who needs it, when they need it. Instead of vital insights being locked away in one department or buried in an inbox, they’re shared openly and organised where any authorised team member can find them. This cultural and technological shift ensures that your company’s collective knowledge works for everyone, not just the few who know where to look.

Embracing a knowledge-for-all approach delivers real business benefits. Executives consistently find that when teams have good access to information, it leads to faster, better decision-making, less wasted time, and far less duplication of effort. Think about it: if every employee can quickly tap into the organisation’s braintrust – whether it’s the latest sales numbers, a past project post-mortem, or that client case study from last year – they can move faster with confidence. Work gets done right the first time because people aren’t operating on outdated data. New hires get up to speed quicker because the answers to their questions are readily available in a central knowledge hub. In essence, knowledge for all isn’t just a mantra, it’s a strategic imperative for any business that wants to be efficient and agile.

Of course, making “knowledge for all” a reality is easier said than done. Today’s enterprises run on a patchwork of dozens (sometimes hundreds) of different apps and systems. (Fun fact: large companies use over 230 different apps on average. Each tool is a potential island of information. Your documents might live in Confluence or SharePoint, conversations in Slack or Microsoft Teams, tasks in Jira, designs in Figma – the list goes on. Without a unifying strategy, valuable knowledge gets trapped in these scattered places. What’s needed is a way to connect all those dots, so that anyone in the company can search and access what they need across all systems, all in one place. In other words, we need technology that turns “knowledge for all” from aspiration into daily reality.

Atlassian + Rovo: Leading the Way to Unified Knowledge

Enter Atlassian and its new AI-powered teammate, Rovo. Atlassian Rovo is an AI-driven knowledge discovery tool designed to help teams find information faster, learn from it, and take action – bringing the “knowledge for all” vision to life. Atlassian has long been a champion of open teamwork and knowledge sharing (after all, this is the company behind collaboration tools like Jira and Confluence). Now, together with Rovo, Atlassian is taking that mission to the next level by tackling the chronic problem of enterprise search and information silos. As Atlassian’s Sherif Mansour puts it, “We like to think of Rovo as a large knowledge model for organisations. It’s a knowledge discovery product for every knowledge worker.” In other words, Rovo is built to give every employee the superpower of instant information – exactly what knowledge for all is all about.

So what can Rovo actually do? In a nutshell, it helps you find, learn, and act on knowledge scattered across your organisation, in a matter of seconds. Rovo’s AI-powered search reaches across all your Atlassian tools and your third-party apps to surface exactly what you need, when you need it – no more hopping between 10 different platforms to find a file. It understands context, so you get relevant, contextual results (not a dump of random links). Once you find information, Rovo helps you learn from it by providing AI-generated insights and summaries, giving you deeper understanding beyond just keywords. It doesn’t stop at passive information retrieval – Rovo also enables you to act on knowledge via Rovo Agents. These agents are like virtual teammates that can automate tasks and workflows based on the information you’ve found. In plain terms, Rovo not only finds that troubleshooting guide you were looking for, it could even help execute the solution or update the relevant Jira tickets for you. Atlassian’s message here is clear: it’s time to “stop searching and start doing.”

Crucially, Atlassian Rovo pulls this off while respecting the nuances of enterprise security and permissions. It’s built on Atlassian’s Teamwork Graph, a common data model that aggregates knowledge from all your connected tools (Atlassian or otherwise) into one holistic view. That means Rovo knows who should have access to what – the marketing intern won’t see the HR team’s private files, for example – but they will see everything they are meant to have access to. With connectors to popular apps like Google Drive, Microsoft SharePoint, Slack, GitHub, and many more out-of-the-box, Rovo breaks down the walls between disparate systems. The result is a single point of truth for your team’s knowledge. Need to know if a project is on track? Rovo can search Jira issues, Confluence pages, and even that proposal in Google Drive you forgot about, and give you an answer in seconds. By unifying these silos, Atlassian and Rovo are delivering on the promise of knowledge for all through technology – making the right information discoverable and useable by everyone across an organisation.

The Business Case for Rovo and “Knowledge for All”

Let’s talk about why all this matters in concrete business terms. Why invest in a tool like Rovo, and what do you stand to gain? Simply put, empowering your teams with instant knowledge access pays off big – in productivity, in dollars, and in competitive advantage. Here are just a few of the benefits and ROI drivers:

• Time Saved = Money Saved: When people spend less time searching, they spend more time creating value. Imagine cutting down that 20-30% of lost time to near zero – the impact is enormous. Atlassian’s own engineers found that just by making internal documentation easily searchable with Rovo, each developer saved an hour or two every week. Multiply that across an organisation and across 52 weeks, and you’re looking at thousands of hours reclaimed. For a large company, that translates to millions of dollars in productivity gains (recall the $25M per year loss figure – now picture flipping that into a $25M). Rovo essentially gives you back a full day of work that was previously lost, for every employee, every week.

• Better, Faster Decision-Making: Decisions are only as good as the information behind them. With knowledge readily accessible to all, teams can make data-driven decisions without delay. No more waiting days for an answer or moving forward with incomplete info. Leaders report that good information access directly improves decision quality and speed. In fast-moving markets, that agility can be the difference between seizing an opportunity or missing it. Rovo’s ability to surface up-to-date, relevant insights on demand means your team is always armed with the facts, whether they’re crafting strategy or solving a customer issue.

• Reduced Duplication & Rework: A robust knowledge-for-all strategy prevents the costly scenario of multiple people unknowingly tackling the same task. When everyone can see what’s been done and learned, they can build on it instead of reinventing the wheel. This avoids duplication of efforts that costs companies millions. It also means higher quality output – work doesn’t have to be redone because the first attempt failed due to missing information. Rovo helps ensure that lessons learned in one corner of the business are available to the whole organisation, so you don’t pay twice for the same lesson.

• Enhanced Employee Efficiency & Satisfaction: Let’s face it – talented people don’t want to spend their days on fruitless searches or bureaucratic treasure hunts. By giving employees quick access to the knowledge they need, you enable them to do the work they want to do: solving problems, being creative, serving clients. This boost in efficiency not only improves output, it also improves morale. Team members feel empowered and supported by their tools, rather than hindered by them. Over time, that can translate into better retention; people are more likely to stick around in an environment where they can be effective and impactful (and less likely to burn out from constant frustration).

In short, Atlassian Rovo makes the business case for itself: it directly addresses the wasted time, increased costs, and reduced efficiency that plague organisations big and small. By implementing a “knowledge for all” approach with the right tools, you’re not just fixing an IT issue – you’re building a smarter, faster, and more resilient business.

See What’s Next at TEAM ’25 – Don’t Miss Out

The ability to find information quickly can make or break a team’s success, and Atlassian (together with Rovo) is leading the charge to ensure knowledge for all becomes the new normal. Here’s the exciting part: we’re just getting started. Atlassian’s annual TEAM ’25 conference is around the corner, and rumour has it there are some major announcements in store that will push the boundaries of how we connect with knowledge at work. Want a sneak peek of the future of teamwork and AI-driven productivity? Join us at TEAM ’25 to see Atlassian and Rovo’s vision in action. The event takes place April 8–10, 2025 in Anaheim, CA, and it’s the place to be if you care about supercharging your team’s efficiency and staying ahead of the curve.

Consider this your personal invitation and call to action: don’t let your company fall victim to the hidden costs of lost knowledge. Come learn how you can turn things around. Attend TEAM ’25, witness the latest innovations (there’s nothing like seeing a live demo of Rovo answering what would’ve been an impossible query), and bring back the insights that will give your organisation a competitive edge. It’s time to stop searching and start doing – and we can’t wait to show you how. See you at TEAM ’25!

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