Productivity assessment issues in office automation

Increased productivity is the most frequently cited benefit of office automation. However, little is known about the measurement, or even the meaning, of productivity for office workers. Office workers, particularly non-clerical or knowledge workers, have complex, often ill-defined, jobs that do not allow simple measures of productivity such as those used on the assembly line. Thus productivity assessments in offices have frequently used such fragments of the total job as number of messages sent by managers and number of pages typed by secretaries as indicators of productivity. Two methods, projections from task analyses and pilot projects followed by assessment, are commonly used to measure office productivity. While these methods are useful there are definite limitations to their application, which, if ignored, may result in erroneous conclusions. This paper discusses these limitations and develops a framework for the analysis of productivity issues in office automation