Measuring the Impact of Electronic Data Management on Information Worker Productivity

Introduction and Overview In this project, we studied the effects of digitizing work on information workers' time-use and performance at a large insurance firm. We were able to determine of direction of causality between technology and performance by exploiting a quasi-experiment: the phased introduction of Electronic Document Management (EDM) across multiple offices at different dates. Our analysis used a " difference-indifferences " methodology to econometrically measure changes in a suite of performance metrics. This allowed us to derive unbiased estimates of the main effects. In addition, the study used three complementary research techniques to support the econometric findings: extensive onsite interviews before, during and after implementation; detailed time use diaries and observation; and a series of surveys. In addition to large changes in time-use and performance, we found that digitization leads to a decline in the routine labor input and an increase in complementary non-routine cognitive labor input. To interpret our results, we describe below a new micro-level mechanism, " IT-enabled slack " , that explains how exactly IT can lead to payoff in terms of information worker productivity.