IT change lesson 1: Align your goals
September 30, 2010 by janet · Leave a Comment
Goals—those internal ideas people hold that drive their actions. Everyone in your project has them…developers, designers, project managers, users, and leaders. The challenge is getting all of these goals to line up in a way that gets everyone focused on the same ones at the same time.
In technology implementations, we often get caught up in our project goals – meeting the deadlines, staying on budget, developing the features and training materials. But, don’t lose sight of the bigger goals – the reasons you started the project in the first place. You need people to actually use the stuff your are buidling and implementing. And using it means finding some goals in common between the users and the project team.
“When the technology does not help people achieve their ends, they abandon it, or work around it, or change it, or think about changing their ends.”*
The case of the ad hoc database…
In my last blog: ’IT Change: improving your odds’, I introduced the case of iWork. A quick summary is in italics below:
In 2004, iWork (a pseudonym) selected and implemented a new software for administration. The system was being used by a number of similar organisations to iWork. The software was intended to be a total solution that customers, partners, leaders, and employees could use to connect through a single application.
However, one department within iWork did not fully adopt the technology. Instead, they created a new technology—a database and user interface, which has now been in use for approximately 4 years. A series of interviews conducted with stakeholders across the organisation were used to understand the factors that influenced the creation of this ad hoc database.
The senior leaders at iWork planned to capture data across all departments in order to create effeciency and improve customer experience. But the new system performed slowly, was difficult to understand, and added time to users’ tasks, who were already feeling overworked. The users’ goals (to reduce time spent on tasks) did not align to the leaders’ goals (a central data repository).
Research has shown that individuals will be more committed to goals which are intrinsic (important to them) – not extrinsic (important to their boss or the project manager).**
Interestingly, this is especially problematic in implementations of vendor-created software when there designers may have embedded unwanted constraints into the system – interfering with users achieving their goals.
The solution? iWork needed to surface the goals and assumptions of both the project team and the leaders early and look for common ground – goals that were intrinsic to all. Then, they could have recruited end users to look for creative solutions that blended their goals with those of the other project stakeholders. But, that didn’t happen. When the users tried to discuss their goals, they felt ignored. In response they channeled their creative efforts into an ad hoc database that addressed their intrinsic goals. As a result, the organisation did not realise the benefits it set out to achieve.
Lesson 1 in IT change: If you want people to use new technology, find and focus on the common goals.
*Orlikowski, W. J. (2000). Using Technology and Constituting Structures: A Practice Lens for Studying Technology in Organizations. Organization. Science 11(4) 404- 428.
**Locke, E.A. (1996). Motivation through conscious goal setting. Applied & Preventative Psychology, 5(2), 117- 124.
IT change: Improving your odds
September 6, 2010 by janet · Leave a Comment
The software is selected, the hardware is installed and the training has been delivered. Yet 70% of IT change projects never achieve desired results. Worse, there is a general lack of agreement on how and why technology succeeds and fails in organizations, Earlier this year I undertook a research project on the topic of IT change with the goal to improve the odds—to create successful IT change projects. 
Building on academic research, this project focused on 5 factors of influence which work together to drive technology use in organisations.
Buyers, vendors, and even academics sometimes confuse technology acquisition with technology change—believing that selection and planning alone is enough to achieve the organisational strategy. But, features don’t solve business problems, people do.
The reality is that 2 similar organisations can acquire 2 similar technologies and yet experience very different results.
Core to understanding these differences is the concept of ‘agency’—the people who influence technology use…the developers, designers, leaders, project managers and users. They all come to IT change with expectations and goals.
And, while we like to think we have control over these agents, the fact is people can be a bit…well, unpredictable.
Understanding technology use requires attention to people, their goals and, most importantly, their interactions.
The five factors will be explored in this blog over the next few weeks…each using the following case study:
The case of the ad hoc database
In 2004, iWork (a pseudonym) selected and implemented a new software for administration. The system was being used by a number of similar organisations to iWork. The software was intended to be a total solution that customers, partners, leaders, and employees could use to connect through a single application.
However, one department within iWork did not fully adopt the technology. Instead, they created a new technology—a database and user interface, which has now been in use for approximately 4 years. A series of interviews conducted with stakeholders across the organisation were used to understand the factors that influenced the creation of this ad hoc database.
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