Estimating Applicability of New Mobile Content Formats to Organizational Use

Innovations on information and communication technology reshape organizational communication. Our ability to estimate applicability of new technologies and content formats to organizational use has been limited to generic quantitative methods at the level of technologies and industries and elaborate qualitative methods targeting specific phenomena at the organizational level. In this paper we estimate quantitatively the applicability of MMS, SMS, XHTML, and XML to organizational use based on an analysis of all communication of an organization unit. We enumerate over 700 communication genres using a genre-based information systems planning method, categorise them with taxonomy of communication forms, and summarise the results quantitatively per category. SMS, XHTML, and especially XML seem to match the contemporary communication practices of the organization to a much higher extent than MMS. Affect of changes in organizational communication practices and generality of the results are discussed in the end as well as applicability of the method for other purposes.

[1]  W. Orlikowski,et al.  Explicit and Implicit Structuring of Genres in Electronic Communication: Reinforcement and Change of Social Interaction , 1999 .

[2]  Tero Päivärinta,et al.  A Genre-Based Method for Information Systems Planning , 2001, Information Modeling in the New Millennium.

[3]  Thomas K. Landauer,et al.  How Much do People Remember? Some Estimates of the Quantity of Learned Information in Long-Term Memory , 1986, Cogn. Sci..

[4]  W. Orlikowski,et al.  Genre Repertoire: The Structuring of Communicative Practices in Organizations , 1994 .

[5]  JoAnne Yates,et al.  Collaborative genres for collaboration: genre systems in digital media , 1997, Proceedings of the Thirtieth Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

[6]  Tero Päivärinta,et al.  Genre-based metadata for enterprise document management , 2000, Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

[7]  M. Lynne Markus,et al.  Toward a “Critical Mass” Theory of Interactive Media , 1987 .

[8]  Tero Päivärinta,et al.  On rethinking organizational document genres for electronic document management , 1999, Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences. 1999. HICSS-32. Abstracts and CD-ROM of Full Papers.

[9]  W. Orlikowski,et al.  Genres of Organizational Communication: A Structurational Approach to Studying Communication and Media , 1992 .

[10]  Aviva Freedman,et al.  Systems of Genres and the Enactment of Social Intentions , 2003 .

[11]  Jukka Heikkilä,et al.  Adoption and use of mobile services. Empirical evidence from a Finnish survey , 2002, Proceedings of the 35th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

[12]  Richard J. Boland,et al.  Hard and soft information genres: an analysis of two Notes databases , 1997, Proceedings of the Thirtieth Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

[13]  Henk Sol,et al.  Proceedings of the 54th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences , 1997, HICSS 2015.

[14]  JoAnne Yates,et al.  Genre taxonomy: A knowledge repository of communicative actions , 2001, TOIS.

[15]  J. Nunamaker,et al.  Proceedings of the 32nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences , 1999 .

[16]  Thomas Erickson,et al.  Making sense of computer-mediated communication (CMC): conversations as genres, CMC systems as genre ecologies , 2000, Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

[17]  JoAnne Yates,et al.  Control through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management , 1990 .

[18]  Robert W. Zmud,et al.  An Attribute Space for Organizational Communication Channels , 1990, Inf. Syst. Res..