Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!usc!ginosko!uunet!mcsun!ukc!icdoc!syma!marksm
From: marksm@syma.sussex.ac.uk (Mark S Madsen)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: Low Productivity of Knowledge Workers
Summary: email certainly helps a lot!
Message-ID: <1390@syma.sussex.ac.uk>
Date: 25 Sep 89 12:31:19 GMT
References: <9676@venera.isi.edu> <189@crucible.UUCP> <291@voa3.UUCP> <7765@microsoft.UUCP> <425@crdos1.crd.ge.COM>
Reply-To: marksm@syma.susx.ac.uk (Mark S Madsen)
Organization: University of Sussex
Lines: 47

In article <425@crdos1.crd.ge.COM> davidsen@crdos1.UUCP (bill davidsen) writes:
>In article <7765@microsoft.UUCP>, philba@microsoft.UUCP (Phil Barrett) writes:
>|  At the `soft', we use email to tremendous benefit.  I've worked at companies
>|  that didn't have email and I found that dealing with people outside your
>|  immediate group to be incredibly inefficient -- phone tag and notes left
>  You're not alone in that. I am part of a group which installed and is
>enhancing a corporate email gateway system, between corporate DECnet,
>...email was rated as "important to productivity" or
>"very important to productivity" by more respondents than any other
>service we provide.

Well, my "corporation" is actually a university, but I take it that
scientists also qualify as knowledge workers too, so it is likely that
you will be interested to hear my comments.

Productivity in research science is largely defined in terms of the
number of papers published: this applies to individual researchers,
departments, universities, etc. (Don't flame me, I didn't build the
system.)

I find that email is the single biggest aid to my research. It doesn't
enable me to do anything that I couldn't have done without it, except
that I can collaborate with someone 5000 miles away at a rate which is
more than an order of magnitude higher. Let me demonstrate:

WITHOUT EMAIL: Write letters to collaborator; letter cycles take about 10
days. Type up research notes into a paper, mail it to collaborator, wait
for reply with suggestions, revise, mail paper to.... Each cycle still
takes 10 days at least. The typical time required to agree on a short
paper (say, 5 pages) is about 2 months.

WITH EMAIL: Send email with notes in LaTeX form. Reply can be received
in about 48 hours, allowing for time differences and thinking before
replying. Then type paper in LaTeX, email LaTeX source, collaborator
inserts changes directly, along with comments in the source. Time taken
to write the same paper, about 2 to 3 weeks.

Also, some journals now accept submissions (in LaTeX or TeX) via email.

Hope this helps the discussion.

Mark
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##  Mark S. Madsen  ####  marksm@syma.sussex.ac.uk  ###################
####  Astronomy Centre, University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9QH, UK.  ##
####################  Life's a bitch.  Then you die.  #################