Email as an Integration Device: A Study of Work Place Information Seeking
Paper in proceeding, 2008

Being able to find relevant information is an important task for today’s organisational members, but how is this achieved when there are so many sources and tools to choose amongst? By interviewing thirteen IT professionals about their information seeking activities, we have analysed their needs, their sources, and their tools and made interesting and novel discoveries. Our findings suggest that social issues are important also in such a seemingly individual task as information seeking. Lack of social awareness in search tools made people use email as a way to integrate different information environments and be able to relate to fellow employees. These insights should be used to design future work place information seeking tools to benefit from the social interactions that exist in a corporate setting.

work place

the web

email

search engines

Organisational information seeking

intranet

Author

Dick Stenmark

University of Gothenburg

Taline Jadaan

Proceedings of AMCIS 2008, Toronto, Canada, August 14-17, 2008

Subject Categories

Information Science

More information

Created

10/10/2017