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Patterns of thought in software adoption |
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Location: Blogs barton's aggregated blogbarton's computer science blog |
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| Posted by: barton |
4/16/2008 |
We've been doing a lot recently supporting teams in deploying and / or
upgrading to Team
Foundation Server 2008. It's been a very interesting and
enlightening period of our work at Luminous because it is field testing
and reinforcing some of the fundamental ideas we have held
about the underlying patterns of thought people experience when
adopting software.
Software adoption is a complex cultural process that is often relegated
to a functional discipline that is ill-equipped to address the
organizational and cultural requirements that support
successful adoption. Adoption is not simply putting someone
new in front of someone. Optimally it addresses the notion of enhancing
the capability of the individual, which inherently is about changing
the way people think about the world and their relationship to it.
Software adoption always occurs as some substep to a larger process,
namely change
management within an organization. Executed properly, it is
always motivated by strategic goals. There is an excellent
paper on this topic written by John Kotter from the Harvard Business
Review entitled "Leading
Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail".
It's funny how we can sometimes generate certain ideas and then lay
them aside only to later realize how important and central those ideas
are to what we do. A case in point here has to do with the ideas I
presented in my 2003 CPSR
paper entitled "Patterns
of Thought: An alternative approach to technology design".
In this paper, I argued that regardless of the type of technology,
people tend to respond in the same, predictable ways to the
introduction of a new technology. These responses can be categorized as:
- Masking:
New technologies emerge in the guise of (or are used as if
they were) old technologies;
- Convergence:
Technologies evolve by converging with other technologies;
- Specificity:
Different people use technologies differently;
- Ramifications:
The adoption of technologies by a society always causes fundamental
changes in that society;
- Evolution:
Changes may take time yet they do occur;
- Entropy:
People resist change.
Knowing this, I argue that when deploying new technologies (or
designing new ones) that it is of great value to consider
these cultural responses as part of the process. In this
fashion, focus is tightened around the strategic goals of the
technology for the target group so that clear steps to achieve the
objectives can remain at the fore and be fully realized.
At Luminous, this is a core aspect of our practice. We have deep
knowledge about specific technologies, but it is our understanding of
organizational dynamics, culture, and human behavior that enable us to
support organizations to consider how these critical factors play into
the process of deployment so that these are considered and addressed in
practical terms.
What we have found is that there is a profound difference
between the results acheived by those organizations who take the time
to fully explore the strategic, organizational, and cultural
aspects of deploying a new technology and those who simply take a
functional approach to the same process.
Results and benefits of employing our suggested approach include:
- Greater alignment about the strategic vision;
- Tangible ways to track and measure progress;
- Accelerated progress;
- Greater ease in execution as technology becomes perceived
as supportive rather than hindering;
- Technology investments are fully aligned with business
goals;
- End-users have a sense of ownership about "their" process
and tools;
- Enthusiasm for change process and an environment where
innovation is possible;
- Work environment moves toward proactive initiatives;
These are results we can get really excited about.
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