STEPHENS - Using combination of ICTs per task

The Successive Use of Information and Communication Technologies at Work

Keri K. Stephens

Communication Theory 2007- ISSN 1050-3293

doi:10.1111/j.1468-2885.2007.00308.x

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Past research on information and communication technology (ICT) use has largely assumed that people use only one ICT per task.

Yet completing a task often requires a mix of ICTs used over time. 

ICT succession theory argues that by examining the modalities—for example, auditory, visual, and textual—found in ICTs today, we can predict how to use follow-up or successive ICTs to complete tasks efficiently and effectively. 

The six propositions that form the core of this theory make predictions linking tasks and types of successive ICT use. Using complementary modalities should help people best accomplish persuasion, status, information, and problem-solving tasks. This strategy should also increase the likelihood that communicators will reach their audience. Using mass media as a precursor, should ICT help people best accomplish information, status, and learning tasks. Using text-capable ICTs as a follow-up strategy is most helpful in persuasion, information, and problem-solving tasks.

Conclusions

IST focuses on predicting how ICTs are used as follow-up technologies to help people accomplish tasks. This theory is one step toward better understanding combinatorial ICT use. 

As people continue to be overloaded with information, knowing how to be productively redundant with communication attempts is a worthwhile objective. 

And with the barrage of device options available today, for example, BlackBerries and mobile phones, it is increasingly important for scholars to keep pace with these changes. 

This is a relevant consideration because ‘‘there is a growing consensus that microelectronically based information technologies are altering the way we live, work, communicate, and organize our activities’’ (Orlikowski & Barley, 2001, p. 146). 

A combinatorial view of communication helps us succeed and manage in an increasingly global and often virtual organizational environment.

Information and communication technologies (ICTs), by themselves, are just objects, ‘‘simply dead matter’’ (Poole & DeSanctis, 1990). But when two or more people interact, ICTs become an important component in the process of communication. As communication scholars, we often consider communication as being processual, but our research tends to simplify this process to the lowest common denominator—using one ICT for a given task.

The practice of comparing ICTs is a longstanding tradition in communication scholarship. Organizational studies typically examine a managerial context. One might ask, for example, how managers send messages via an ICT that allows them to most effectively or efficiently reach employees (Daft & Lengel, 1984, 1986; Daft, Lengel, & Trevino, 1987; Dahle, 1954; Walton, 1959, 1962). Contemporary studies have focused on rank-ordering existing ICTs and attempting to match ICTs to their various uses (e.g., media richness theory and uses and gratifications). But as scholars have shown, simply rank-ordering ICTs, which change over time, is an oversimplification

As people in organizations use technology to accomplish tasks, they do not use one ICT isolated from other ICTs. 

There are myriad communication options, and many tasks require ongoing communication that unfolds over time. 

For example, people often send an e-mail and then upon receiving no reply, they use the telephone to follow-up with that same person. When they reach their intended recipient, they say, ‘‘I just sent you an important email, do you have any questions?’’ 

Not only does this example likely ring true with most people’s experiences but also prominent scholars in interpersonal communication (e.g., Walther & Parks, 2002), psychology (Hesse, Werner, & Altman, 1988), and management (Boczkowski & Orlikowski, 2004; Saunders & Jones, 1990) have called for further study of the phenomenon of ICT use combinations. Walther and Parks explain, ‘‘Communication efficiency may rest on sequences or combinations of ICTs rather than isolated choices about a discrete medium’’ (p. 534).

Enlarging our perspective on ICT use can take many forms, but the focus here is on combinatorial ICT use.

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 Focusing on successive or follow-up ICTs is one step in understanding more realistically how ICTs can be and are used.

There are three major advantages to expanding our current view of ICT use to include a successive ICT perspective.

First, and of particular importance to communication scholars, is that this view more closely approximates interactional communication. If we are to understand the complexities involved in using ICTs for communication, it is imperative that we conceptualize our theories as more processual.

Another contribution of this current work is that it links specific communication tasks with features of ICTs and then sets forth a series of propositions that are testable.

Finally, a successive ICT predictive model provides practical value. In work environments where people are increasingly receiving an excessive amount of messages from peers, supervisors, subordinates, and clients, receiving sound advice about using ICTs to complete tasks should be welcome.

It is important to define ICTs and elaborate on several types because these serve explanatory and limiting functions in this work. 

Here, ICTs include technologies that handle information and enable communication among human actors. 

This definition is more limiting than some that also include information exchange between electronic systems, but the focus of this theory is on interaction between people. Face-to-face communication is also included as an ICT, both as a comparison point and because in this model it functions like a technology channel by facilitating communication among human actors.

Defining specific ICTs is difficult because they are constantly changing. 

They can be comprised of a single communication channel, such as the simple telephone that only has an auditory channel, or they can be multimodal, such as face-to-face communication, because communicators receive information from both auditory and visual channels. 

Contemporary communication devices, such as mobile phones, complicate this further because their text-messaging functions constitute multiple channels or embedded ICTs. This complication makes distinguishing their functions difficult (Flanagin & Metzger, 2001; Hollingshead & Contractor, 2002; Vertegaal, 2003). 

Although elaborating on the channel differences found in the various ICTs is likely worthwhile, to maintain the scope of this document, this work focuses only on this distinction when it helps to inform the processual nature of this theory.