Message Management Systems: Concepts, Motivations, and Strategic Effects

This paper motivates the need for system-level message management software. It begins by considering information flows in the workplace as a source of potential gains in efficiency. We next investigate work-flow automation and electronic data interchange (EDI) as indicative of current technologies applied to work processes and message management Having described current technology and our vision of work processes, we propose an alternative, general-purpose, oftware technology for supporting application-to-application c mmunication. Problems of EDI, of processto-process communication, and of describing information items are discussed in terms of the communication problems they present We then justify the need for this kind of software and lay out the criteria (or plausibility conditions) for evaluating a proposal for this sort of system software. The use of a formal communication language is proposed as a common solution to these problems. This proposal is examined in the context of the EDI problem, in order to demonstrate how the proposal might work in practice. Practical benefits of the proposal are discussed that highlight the impact such a technology might have on business practices. The proposed solution is measured Acknowledgments: Thanks to David C. Blair, Eric K. demons, Michael Gordon, John Holland, Gerald E. Hurst, Jr., Ronald M. Lee, and Paul Thagard for patinent discussions and illuminating insights, but nothing here is to be blamed on them. Thanks also go to the referees for helping us focus and tighten our paper. The research was supported in part by U.S. Coast Guard contract number DTCG39-86-C-E92204, Steven O. Kimbrough principal investigator. Journal of Management Information Systems f Fall 1992, Vol. 9, No. 2, pp. 29-52 Copyright ® M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 1992 This content downloaded on Fri, 1 Mar 2013 12:28:13 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 30 STEVEN O. KIMBROUGH AND SCOTT A. MOORE against the plausibility conditions presented earlier in the paper; it is found to be sufficient insome cases and in need of further investigation i others. We then discuss the industrial-organizational implications of the availability of such a technology, and hypothesize that it would affect he number and form of cooperative business relationships as well as their scope and depth. We also hypothesize that it would provide advantages to those firms that quickly adopt the technology.