Information, technology and information worker productivity: Task level evidence (NBER Working Paper No

We study the fine-grained relationships among information flows, IT use, and individual information-worker produc-tivity, by analyzing work at a midsize executive recruiting firm. We analyze both project-level and individual-level performance using: (1) direct observation of over 125,000 e-mail messages over a period of 10 months by individual workers (2) detailed accounting data on revenues, compensation, project completion rates, and team membership for over 1300 projects spanning 5 years, and (3) survey data on a matched set of the same workers ’ IT skills, IT use and in-formation sharing. These detailed data permit us to econometrically evaluate a multistage model of production and in-teraction activities at the firm, and to analyze the relationships among communications flows, key technologies, work practices, and output. We find that (a) the structure and size of workers ’ communication networks are highly correlated with their performance; (b) IT use is strongly correlated with productivity but mainly by allowing multitasking rather than by speeding up work; (c) productivity is greatest for small amounts of multitasking but beyond an optimum, mul-titasking is associated with declining project completion rates and revenue generation; and (d) asynchronous informa-tion seeking such as email and database use promotes multitasking while synchronous information seeking over the phone shows a negative correlation. Overall, these data show statistically significant relationships among social net-works, technology use, completed projects, and revenues for project-based information workers. Results are consistent with simple production models of queuing and multitasking and these methods can be replicated in other settings, sug