The Electronic Office and Organizational Behavior - Measuring Office Activities
Abstract The development of truly successful electronic office systems depends upon the extent to which they satisfy the needs of their users. Traditionally such systems have been designed by the technical experts with little input from need assessments conducted by behavioral scientists. One reason has been the lack of a language by which the needs of white collar users could be expressed in terms meaningful to both behavioral researchers and software and hardware developers. This paper presents a set of taxonomies designed to overcome this problem. The focus is on the white collar tasks which are undertaken in the office, bith in a general sense and looking at specific details such as communication content and medium, inout sources and output destinations, work processes and support technology. The taxonomies and the measures they imply have been used in a major field study of office activities, the results of which are being reported elsewhere.