Several readers wrote to tell us about a groundbreaking study reported in Computerworld. Researchers at Boston University and MIT analyzed how IT makes people more productive at an individual level. They gathered more than 125,000 email messages, 5 years of project data, and survey responses to see what factors predicted revenue generation and completed projects. Abstracts for the original articles are available. Among the surprises: IT didn't necessarily make projects faster but it did dramatically increase productivity by facilitating multitasking; and IT-supported social networks predicted productivity better than experience did.
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/27/0056212&threshold=4