Email as an Integration Device: A Study of Work Place Information Seeking

Being able to find relevant information is an important task for today’s organisational members, but how is this achieved when there are so many sources and tools to choose amongst? By interviewing thirteen IT professionals about their information seeking activities, we have analysed their needs, their sources, and their tools and made interesting and novel discoveries. Our findings suggest that social issues are important also in such a seemingly individual task as information seeking. Lack of social awareness in search tools made people use email as a way to integrate different information environments and be able to relate to fellow employees. These insights should be used to design future work place information seeking tools to benefit from the social interactions that exist in a corporate setting.