Understanding Organizational Web Use

Abstract

This chapter presents findings from a recent investigation by the authors of how knowledge workers in organizations utilize the Web to seek external information as part of their daily work (Choo, Detlor, & Turnbull, 2000). Though other studies of Web use presented in the last chapter cover a broad range of Web users, most Web usage studies tend to concentrate on students and home users (Kehoe, Pitkow & Rogers, 1998). In contrast, the study presented here focuses exclusively on corporate Web users who utilize the Web as an integral part of their daily work. All participants in our study used the Web to carry out various work-related activities and were connected to the Internet through continuous leased-line access and relatively high-powered machines. The purpose of our research was to focus on these “work-oriented” Web users in the hope that we would be able to understand and predict trends and patterns in organizational Web use.