The Degree of Digitalization of the Information Over-Flow: A Case Study

The degree of digitalization in organizations has increased remarkably. This trend will continue if the so called natural laws of information technology are veracious. At the same time the format of communicated information has shifted from traditional face-to-face and analogue communication to digital communication forms, such as digital documents. Because information is increasingly available in digital form on one hand for example the duplication and forwarding of email messages and attachments gets easier, which may easily lead to information overflow. On the other hand digitalization increases productivity, improves quality and reduces costs. As the ability of humans to adopt information has not developed at the same pace as information and communication technology (ICT), it is interesting to see whether the degree of digital communication correlates with the total amount of communication in organization. In this paper we tested this hypothesis in an industrial organization using genre-based measurement method to gather data on communication flows. The results show, that the correlation between the degree of digital communication and the amount of total communication can be seen in some degree.