Information, Technology and Information Worker Productivity: Task Level Evidence

Past research has typically looked at fairly aggregate data on the relationship between IT and business value. In an effort to reveal the fine-grained relationships between IT use, information flows, and individual information-worker productivity, we study task level practices of information workers at a midsize executive recruiting firm. We analyze (1) detailed accounting data on revenues, completion rates, team participation and compensation for 1300+ projects over 5 years, (2) data on a matched set of individual workers self-reported information technology skills, use and information sharing, and (3) direct observation of over 125,000 e-mail messages over a period of 10 months by these same workers. These data make it possible to develop and econometrically test a multistage model of production and interaction activities at the firm, and to analyze the correlations among key technologies, work practices, and output. We find that (a) information technology use is positively correlated with increased revenues and project completion; (b) asynchronous information seeking such as email and DB access promote multitasking while synchronous information seeking such as phone and face-to-face contact show a negative correlation and (c) the structure and size of a worker’s communication network, including such social network metrics as betweeness and constraint are highly correlated with performance. Overall, these data show a statistically significant and positive relationship among technology use, social network characteristics, completed projects and revenues for project-based information workers. The strong results are likely due to the fine grained detail of daily communications activity and task level revenues and are consistent with simple models of queuing and multitasking. The methods in this paper can be replicated in other settings, suggesting a new frontier for IT value research.