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Researchers Measure E-Mail's Potency As Business Tool

Along with two collaborators, MIT management professor Erik Brynjolfsson has drafted a paper entitled "Information, Technology And Information Worker Productivity: Task Level Evidence" that measures the performance of knowledge workers at an executive recruiting firm, much akin to how researchers over the years have measured the performance of assembly line workers producing widgets.

Traditionally, IT organizations use metrics to evaluate internal operations, but the rage among leading companies today is measuring the impact of IT on the business operations, according to Businesses Apply New Metrics In Measuring IT's Value, this week's cover story in InformationWeek.

According to the paper, in an effort to reveal individual information-worker productivity, Brynjolfsson and his colleagues analyzed project and individual performance at the recruiting firm by using data on revenues, compensation, and project completion rates for more than 1,300 projects spanning five years. In addition, they examined more than 125,000 e-mails sent over a 10-month span by knowledge workers, who gave permission to review their messages. The researchers evaluated this data with the workers' perceptions of their IT skills, along with their actual use of IT and information sharing. Until he conducted this research, Brynjolfsson didn't think it was easy to measure performance by a knowledge worker.

"For me, it was an eye-opener," he says. "Now with this data, I did a 180-degree turn. Information workers are extremely measurable because with just a little bit of effort, you can track basically all of their communications--their outputs and their inputs--and correlate that with their performance."

Brynjolfsson says there's no correlation between the raw number of e-mails sent and productivity, such as completing a project successfully. But if knowledge workers such as Bob actively engage in a social networking site and connect with other participants within the network via e-mail, their success rate in closing deals is higher than those who don't participate in such webs.

"If A [Al] is just sending a lot of e-mail to his e-mail buddy, but doesn't really connect to other people, whereas B [Bob] has a much broader, more diverse set of connections, then that was a very strong indicator [of increased productivity]," Brynjolfsson says. "The broader point is that if you look at the structure of the network, it tells you a lot about which kinds of people are more productive and which people are less productive."

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