|
Archive@NYU >
Stern School of Business >
IOMS: Information Systems Working Papers >
Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item:
http://hdl.handle.net/2451/14504
|
| Title: | MEASURING OFFICE COMPLEXITY |
| Authors: | Sasso, William C. |
| Issue Date: | Feb-1986 |
| Publisher: | Stern School of Business, New York University |
| Series/Report no.: | IS-86-06 |
| Abstract: | An "office" can be described in terms of at least four
different (but related) sets of descriptors: the physical, the social,
the organizational, and the work-related. This paper focuses on
work-related aspects of offices, and presents two measures of complexity
in office work. The first measure, operational complexity, gauges the
average difficulty, in terms of the cognitive resources required, to
perform a "chunk" of office work. Independent of this,
sequential complexity measures the potential number of task sequences
which could be used to accomplish a given chunk of work. Sequential
complexity increases as does the number of "special cases,"
"special cases of special cases," etc. for which the chunk of
office work need be performed. In other words, it focuses on the
complexity of interrelationships between individual office tasks, while
operational complexity is concerned with the complexity of the
individual tasks themselves. We then combine these measures into a an
aggregate measure of overall complexity, combined complexity. The
application of these measures is illustrated, using descriptions of
order entry processes, for two hypothetical firms, employing job shop
and assembly-line technologies, respectively. While these three measures
hardly comprise an exhaustive catalogue of complexity in the
"office" (or even in office work), we believe they provide a
useful basis for both practical application and further theoretical extension. |
| URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/2451/14504 |
| Appears in Collections: | IOMS: Information Systems Working Papers
|
All items in Faculty Digital Archive are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved.
|
