Estimating Applicability of New Mobile Content Formats to Organizational Use

Abstract

Innovations on information and communication technology reshape organizational communication. Our ability to estimate applicability of new technologies and content formats to organizational use has been limited to generic quantitative methods at the level of technologies and industries and elaborate qualitative methods targeting specific phenomena at the organizational level. In this paper we estimate quantitatively the applicability of MMS, SMS, XHTML, and XML to organizational use based on an analysis of all communication of an organization unit. We enumerate over 700 communication genres using a genre-based information systems planning method, categorise them with taxonomy of communication forms, and summarise the results quantitatively per category. SMS, XHTML, and especially XML seem to match the contemporary communication practices of the organization to a much higher extent than MMS. Affect of changes in organizational communication practices and generality of the results are discussed in the end as well as applicability of the method for other purposes.