Shipping professionals are spending a surprising amount of time doing business on the Internet
By Ryan Skinner (email)
This is the second part of the ten-part FoIS series that I introduced yesterday, presenting the results of a unique survey about Internet use in the shipping industry. The survey was created by this blog, together with ShipServ for its Connect10 conference earlier this year.
For those interested in receiving the full responses in a .pdf report after the full series has been published, send me an email requesting it.
The first question of the survey was:
How much time do you spend on the Internet daily doing business-related tasks?
The responses:
Analysis:
Today more and more professionals use the Internet to gather information, research products and companies, compare others' experiences, make purchases and follow-up projects and transactions. Among the online tasks increasing fastest include real-time operations management (via web 2.0 applications) and open or closed network communications.
Bosses worried that personal interest may dilute business results can take comfort in a recent study by University of Melbourne's Dr. Brent Coker who found that "people who surf the Internet for fun at work....are more productive by about 9% than those who don't."
Further, a 2010 Pew Research Center survey found that a majority of both technology stakeholders and critics believed that innovative forms of online cooperation would result in significantly more efficient and responsive businesses by 2020.
Key points
- 82.4% of respondents spend over one hour per day doing work-related activities on the Internet.
- Approximately one-third of respondents spend as much as half of their working day doing business-related tasks on the Internet.
Tomorrow what I call FoIS (the Future of the Internet in Shipping) continues with part three, in which we see how respondents answered the question: "What percentage of your business purchases today start with the Internet?"
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