The persistence of behavior and form in the organization of personal information

study revisits managers who were first interviewed more than 10 years ago to identify their personal information management (PIM) behaviors. The purpose of this study was to see how advances in technology and access to the Web may have affected their PIM behaviors. PIM behaviors seem to have changed little over time, suggesting that technological advances are less important in determining how individuals organize and use information than are the tasks that they perform. Managers identified increased volume of e-mail and the frustration with having to access multiple systems with different, unsynchronized passwords as their greatest PIM challenges. Organizational implications are discussed. Introduction The information needs and uses of individuals in the organizations where they work can both reflect and inform organizational behavior. Seven managers in three organizations were interviewed in 1993 to investigate how they organized , retrieved, and used electronic documents (Barreau, 1995). The guided interviews were derived from Kwasnik's (1989) study of rules that individuals applied toward sorting their physical mail and organizing their offices. Users relied upon topic, document format, and situational factors such as the timeliness of documents, their relative importance, provenance, and intended use to organize and store electronic files, but they applied somewhat different rules to retrieval. For retrieval, they browsed lists within the software used to create the documents, sorting by file name, file extension, or date. Nardi, Anderson, and Erickson (1995) studied filing and finding behaviors of Macintosh users at the Apple Computer Company and found similar behaviors, although the Macintosh users created more folders and went directly to those folders for browsing. Barreau and Nardi (1995) noted that people use three kinds of information in the workplace: ephemeral, working, and archived. People manage large volumes of working information effectively and use archived information rarely, but the management of ephemeral information may be most challenging since it is abundant, varied, and often unrelated to the task at hand. Others have studied personal information management (PIM) behaviors in the workplace and have offered solutions to and some have suggested that the problems observed merely reflect the limitations of the desktop environment (Fertig, Freeman, & Gelernter, 1996). Yet, PIM issues persist and pose challenges for organizations that strive for efficient and effective knowledge creation and use (for a thorough review of PIM research, see Jones, 2007). In testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Technology , Information Policy, Intergovernmental Relations, and …