Assessing the impact of information technology on labor productivity - A field study

Measuring and understanding the productivity impact of information technology (IT) is a significant and difficult problem facing researchers. We propose that the effect of IT applications can be best understood through an analysis at the information process level. We report on a field research conducted to study the impact of IT on the toll collection system of 38 interchanges at the Pennsylvania Turnpike. We focus on an information process that is relatively uncoupled from other processes in the organization to constrain the measurement problem. In addition, this process consists of well structured information processing tasks allowing us to gain a clear understanding of the economic impact of IT on different types of transactions. Our results indicate that the new IT at the turnpike had a substantial impact on the efficiency of processing complex transactions but no impact on simple transactions. These results can only be understood by examining the nature of the toll collection process and the changes generated by the new IT on some of the information processing tasks.