| In public and private sector organizations, workers use information technology (IT) to manipulate low-structure electronic information as digital documents. Executives and secretaries, managers and clerks, technicians and professionals routinely locate, obtain, create, and share reports, spreadsheets, engineering drawings, electronic maps, and other digital content. Prior research focused narrowly on a work group or Lotus Notes, but indications are that digital documents play a large role in daily work and depend upon multiple types of technologies and associated support services. Preliminary investigations led to the development of a new Digital Document Reuse Framework; it proposes elements and relationships instrumental in productive work with digital documents in organizations including document characteristics, accessibility, user/task context, and infrastructure and management. A two-instrument field study exploring the linkage between IT infrastructure and services and digital document work and workers shows that respondents deal with an average of thirty documents per week, frequently transmitting them electronically to others. Above average in computer literacy, document workers search to locate documents they believe exist and routinely reuse their own and others' work. Findings include: Greater experience is associated with higher levels of digital document work, but unexpectedly, those who more frequently engage in some aspects of document work find identifying, locating, learning about, and reusing documents more effortful. Infrastructure capabilities are significant: Greater network capabilities are associated with less effort to identify and locate documents, greater standardization with less effort to share documents outside the work group, and higher overall support with greater numbers of documents worked with in a typical week. Yet, differences in patterns of accessibility, sharing, and searching indicate that document work in organizations operates on a model distinct from that of a library, a database, or the World Wide Web. In conclusion, we can say that ad hoc digital documents are important mechanisms for information and knowledge sharing in today's organizations and that IT policies, practices, and capabilities affect their (re)use. |
