IT Skills More Productive than Face Time
IT skills contribute more to productivity than face-to-face contacts, says Marshall Van Alstyne, an SMG associate professor.
Do people skills make workers more productive? Most people would say so, but Marshall Van Alstyne has found that computer skills contribute more to productivity than do e-mails, phone calls, or face-to-face meetings with clients. Van Alstyne, a School of Management associate professor of information systems, studies information economics.
“People say that face-to-face contacts are essential,” says Van Alstyne. After examining five years of IT usage at a midsize executive recruiting firm, he concluded that “database skill was actually more important in terms of completing projects than face-to-face contacts.”
The study, titled Information, Technology and Information Worker Productivity: Task Level Evidence, was co-written by Sinan Aral and Erik Brynjolfsson of MIT and presented in December 2006 at the International Conference on Information Systems in Milwaukee, where it was named best paper of the conference.
This article was originally published on the SMG Web site.