Understanding the rhythms of email processing strategies in a network of knowledge workers

Scope and Method of Study: While emails have improved the communication effectiveness of knowledge workers, they have also started to negatively impact their productivity. Emails have long been known to provide value to the organization, but the influence of the overwhelming amount of information shared through emails and the inefficiencies surrounding the everyday use of emails at work has remained almost completely unanalyzed so far. Frequent announcements of new emails and then a user's checking her email leads to an escalation in the interruption issues, the resulting overall effectiveness derived from email communication needs to be re-explored. This study uses a computational modeling approach to understand how various combinations of timing-based and frequency-based email processing strategies adopted within different types of knowledge networks can influence average email response time, average primary task completion time, and the overall effectiveness, comprising value-effectiveness and time-effectiveness, in the presence of interruptions. Earlier research on the topic has focused on individual knowledge workers. This study performs a network-level analysis to compare different sender-receiver relationships to assess the impact of different overall email policies on the entire network. Computational models of three different email exchange networks were developed, namely, homogeneous networks with higher users of email, homogeneous networks with low users of email and heterogeneous networks utilizing various combinations of email strategies. A new method, referred to as forward and reverse method, to evaluate and validate model parameters is also developed.

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Management Science and Information Systems

Grantor

Oklahoma State University

Year dc:date.issued

2007

Author dc:creator

• Gupta, Ashish

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Sharda, Ramesh

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Wilson, Rick L.
• Kletke, Marilyn
• Kamath, Manjunath

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright is held by the author who has granted the Oklahoma State University Library the non-exclusive right to share this material in its institutional repository. Contact Digital Library Services at lib-dls@okstate.edu or 405-744-9161 for the permission policy on the use, reproduction or distribution of this material.

Language dc:language

en_US

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14446/6801

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:openresearch.okstate.edu:20.500.14446/6801