Email Adoption, Diffusion, Use and Impact Within Small Firms: A Survey of UK Companies

A survey of 360 small firms of between 10 and 250 employees revealed that 274 (76.1%) had not adopted, and 86 (23.9%) had adopted email. Of firms with less than 100 employees, non-adopters were four times as numerous as adopters, whereas companies with 100-250 employees had a slight majority of adopters. Of the adopters, three-quarters adopted email between 1995 and 1996, whereas only 13% adopted email between 1994 and 1995. Two-thirds of adopting companies have less than 10% of employees using email regularly. A relatively larger proportion of Managing Directors answered the questionnaire from non-adopting companies. A higher proportion of Finance and Computer managers answered the questionnaire in adopting than in non-adopting companies. Of most importance as reasons for non-adoption was that customers and suppliers and other organisations with which respondents needed to communicate did not use email. Of medium importance were implementation barriers to email adoption-expense of installation and maintenance, email being too technical, etc. Of least importance were worries about effect on internal company communication. Adopters used email mainly for simple, fast messages about topics on which there was no disagreement (answering and asking questions, exchanging time-sensitive information, keeping close contact with suppliers and customers). The smaller the company the more that email was used for company-to-company communication rather than for internal communication. Unfortunately, a majority (56.2%) of email adopters said that organisations with which they wished to communicate seldom had email. The main impact of email on personal work effectiveness was ability to make and keep links with external business contacts, and reduced use of fax, post, and telephone. The main perceived impacts on the business were efficiency gains and the ability to perform new tasks such as transmitting electronic spreadsheets and CAD drawings, and the ability to work away from base.

[1]  M. Lynne Markus,et al.  Finding a happy medium: explaining the negative effects of electronic communication on social life at work , 1994, TOIS.

[2]  Tora K. Bikson,et al.  Electronic Mail Use at The World Bank: Messages from Users , 1993, Inf. Soc..

[3]  D. A. Tong,et al.  Requests for medical advice from patients and families to health care providers who publish on the World Wide Web. , 1997, Archives of internal medicine.

[4]  Rob Procter,et al.  Some non-technical issues in the implementation of corporate e-mail: lessons from case studies , 1996, SIGCPR '96.

[5]  James N. MacGregor,et al.  Some Effects of Electronic Mail Use on the Quality of Relationships between Different Organizational Functions , 1996, Comput. Networks ISDN Syst..

[6]  Julie Ann Wambach,et al.  Network politics in an educational organization , 1995, Behav. Inf. Technol..

[7]  Peggy A. Golden,et al.  Factors affecting electronic mail use , 1992 .

[8]  M. Markus.  Electronic Mail as the Medium of Managerial Choice , 1994 .

[9]  Charles H. Davis,et al.  The Modern Language Association: electronic and paper surveys of computer-based tool use , 1996 .

[10]  Detmar W. Straub,et al.  The Effect of Culture on IT Diffusion: E-Mail and FAX in Japan and the U.S , 1994, Inf. Syst. Res..

[11]  Lee Sproull,et al.  Connections: New Ways of Working in the Networked Organization , 1991 .

[12]  Tawfik Jelassi,et al.  Strategic information systems: a European perspective , 1994 .

[13]  Siegfried R. Bocionek.  Agent systems that negotiate and learn , 1995, Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud..

[14]  Robert H. Anderson,et al.  Universal Access to e‐mail: Feasibility and Societal Implications , 1995 .

[15]  Lorne Olfman,et al.  Computer Support for Group Work: Perceptions of the Usefulness of Support Scenarios and End-User Tools , 1995, J. Manag. Inf. Syst..

[16]  T. Astebro,et al.  The effect of management and social interaction on the intra-firm diffusion of electronic mail systems , 1995 .

[17]  J. Walther.  Computer-Mediated Communication , 1996 .

[18]  I. A. Rudy,et al.  A critical review of research on electronic mail , 1996 .

[19]  Peter A. Todd,et al.  A comparative evaluation of the impact of electronic and voice mail on organizational communication , 1993, Inf. Manag..

[20]  Gerardo Patriotta,et al.  Disassembling Frames on the Assembly Line: The Theory and Practice of the New Division of Learning in Advanced Manufacturing , 1996 .

[21]  John P. Walsh,et al.  Computer Networks and Scientific Work , 1996 .