Knowledge + Learning = Performance

My last post continued the case study description of the work I did with the construction management function of a large real estate investment trust (REIT). In it, I shared the work we did to determine the extent of the problem, how we pinpointed the reasons for the gap, and what nontraining and training strategies were selected to fill the gaps. To conclude this case study, today we’ll explore what the team did to manage the training resources and promote training transfer. In addition, I’ll share the training outcomes and results from this project effort.

Managing Training Resources

Budget funds were necessary for the implementation of the aforementioned strategies designed to eliminate the SCMs’ knowledge and skill gaps. The costs primarily involved design and development of the Tenant Improvement (TI) process, job aids, and training courses by a strategic partner consulting firm. (Internal resources were not available to dedicate the time and resources to this project.) Additional funds were needed to cover travel and materials duplication costs, but there was no additional tangible cost related to the time of internal employees to conduct the training and participate in its development. The total estimated cost for this initiative was approximately $250,000 spread over an 18-month period.

In questioning whether it was worth this investment, implementing these strategies enabled the company to not only eliminate the performance gaps, but also all the corresponding knowledge/skill, environmental, and motivational factors outlined previously. Additional benefits included expediting all stages of TI work, accelerating the availability of vacant space for leasing, reducing likelihood of rework in planning and construction phases, simplifying project management, ensuring a higher level of program compliance and optimization, improving customer hand-off, and creating stronger teams and structure to complete their TI work. In addition to these benefits, the company also anticipated being able to save nearly $2,000,000 annually (based on a study completed by a large consulting firm) through the implementation of these strategies. Versus an initial $250,000 investment, these were very worthwhile and powerful results.

Promoting Training Transfer

To ensure training transfer, the team utilized many of the methods recommended by Fisher (1997, pp. 86-91). For example, the team ensured the training programs met the audience’s needs at each of the sessions conducted over the 18-month period. SCMs were heavily involved in the creation of the new TI process, and were provided with many opportunities to provide their input on the training and support needed to help them perform as needed by the organization. To help the SCMs focus on the training, off-site locations were selected for each session. Pre-training materials were also provided that had the SCMs completing activities that had direct input to the training and then back on the job; activities included interviewing their boss, facilitating sessions with their regional construction teams, and gathering and analyzing their own metrics results. During the training, upper management support was displayed through participation of key senior management members including the COO and CEO. Effective facilitation skills and action-oriented training design ensured a highly engaged audience during each session. After the training, follow-up conference calls were held with the SCM team to provide them with additional support as they applied their new skills on the job. Job aids and a new Intranet site were available to further promote transfer and reinforce the training. As needed, the corporate lead also provided individual attention and support to particular SCMs as they learned the new skills or struggled with particular issues. For recognition, successful application of the process and the SCMs’ new skills was featured prominently with a front-page article on the company’s Intranet site.

Training Outcomes and Results

After implementation of the standardized TI process plus training on the process and other performance expectations, the construction management function improved its results on the two key measures of (1) customer survey results and overall satisfaction plus (2) performance on budget and schedule metrics controlled by the construction management team. Impressively, the construction management function reduced their average days late on move-in dates by 84%, with 79% of the jobs delivered within three days of schedule and only 18% of jobs delivered more than five days late. In addition, through implementation of the consistent TI process and a preferred provider program, the construction management team overall was able to deliver under budget based on a comparison of actual TI costs versus budgeted TI costs.

Overall, by conducting the training plus resolving the motivational and environmental issues, this company was able to realize their goals for the construction management function. These goals included improving move-in, TI, and hand-off procedures; reducing or eliminating the cost of late move-ins (both monetary and tenant relationship costs); maximizing the use of metrics to manage the business; and enabling SCMs to lead the construction management function in their regions and for the company overall.

References:

Fisher, S. (1997). The manager's pocket guide to performance management. Amherst, MA: HRD Press.

- Robin

Copyright Robin Donnan 2007. All Rights Reserved.
Performance Associates, Inc.

A knowledge management technology that my company has been investigating recently for our clients is portals and portlets. To understand this concept, portals provide a web delivery framework while portlets are pluggable components that are managed and displayed in the web portal. (Thus, think of portals as the framework and the portlets being the “bits” that reside inside of that framework.) Used together, portals and portlets can provide rich access to both Learning Management System (LMS) and Content Management System (CMS) functionality. For example, they can provide companies with the ability for customer and user registration management, strong data storage capabilities, scalability, use of open source standards based technologies (style sheets, Java, SQL), customer and user level customization, servelet style connectivity with customer-software data and functionality, integration of external web services and RSS feeds, ability to easily communicate to customers via the Portal site(s), and the ease of Portal wide content management.

For a portal product, Liferay is a leading open source portal platform and is based on robust and proven technologies. Key features include:
- Runs on all major application server, database, and operating systems, rendering over 700 deployment combinations
- JSR-168 compliant
- Out-of-the-box usability
- Over 60 portlets pre-bundled
- Over 20 community-contributed themes available
- Only portal available today that can run in either application server or servlet container
- Benchmarked as among the most secure portal platforms using LogicLibrary's Logiscan suite

For a portlet product, Xerceo, Inc. provides full LMS and/or CMS functionality in a portal environment. The combination of these technologies results in very powerful, leading edge, low cost, customer/user level customizable, and scalable technologies for communicating and educating customers and employees. Key features of Xerceo portlets include:
- Robust reporting, tracking, and scheduling of any learning or knowledge event
- Full support of collaboration applications: Adobe Breeze, MS Exchange, etc.
- Hot deployable into an organization’s existing IT infrastructure
- Installed within a few minutes; fully deployed in a few days
- Highly scalable, customizable
Note: For more information on Xerceo and to hear their President and CEO Tim Seager being interviewed by Elliott Masie, navigate to http://www.masieweb.com/lms-followup/video-and-audio-archive/ceo-podcasts.html. The interview can be found near the bottom of the page.

Used together, portlets and portals can provide highly customizable access to knowledge and learning for a company’s employees and customers. Through it, a company can create multiple portal sites (for departments, teams, customers, and even individuals) from which they can access current information and training specific to what that group or individual needs. In addition, usage information can be tracked so that management can know if/who accessed the information. The true power of this technology is in its potential and ability to grow with a company, i.e., as their knowledge and learning needs and demands grow, so can the number of portals and portlets.

- Robin

Copyright Robin Donnan 2007. All Rights Reserved.
Performance Associates, Inc.

Appropriately-selected knowledge management initiatives can help companies in many ways. They can help people access the information they need, support a learning organization culture, and even assist in facilitating change. This paper addresses how an expertise locator system can assist a company during a period of significant organizational change and create the foundation for future knowledge sharing and innovation.

To provide better perspective, we’ll take a look at the use of an expertise locator with a particular company in mind. The company for which this initiative is recommended has recently been acquired and is about to incorporate another recently-acquired company within their operating platform. There has been significant change and unrest for both organizations, and efforts need to be made as soon as possible to get them talking and sharing with one another to help them operate as one. With all these organizational changes, there are also a lot of questions about who to call for what (and in many cases who even still works for the company as significant layoffs are occurring). It is the desire of upper management to return the company to its previous levels of productivity, plus prepare them for future collaboration and further operational improvements. Since awareness and expertise management are core functions in achieving integration, collaboration, and innovation (Maybury, D'Amore, & House, 2002, p. 201), the recommendation is for this company to implement an expertise locator system as an introductory knowledge management initiative. From a timing perspective, updates will need to be made to the corporate directory and this could be an excellent opportunity to capitalize upon to concurrently capture the employees’ area(s) of expertise.

Many other companies have experienced operational benefits from implementing an expertise locator and management system. Some relevant benefits include being able to:

1. “Help people in large, often widely geographically dispersed organizations find out who has subject matter expertise or who knows how and where to get at important know-how.” (Smith & McKeen, 2006, p. 44)

2. “Cultivate a culture of collaboration” (Maybury, D'Amore, & House, 2000, p. 12)

3. “Enable users to create expert profiles and submit questions to be answered by the pros…[and thus] tap into expertise and tacit knowledge.” (Kaplan-Leiserson, 2003, p. 19)

4. Ease the formation of cross-functional teams by facilitating “quick identification of potential skill matches for teams based on employees' backgrounds” (Becerra-Fernandez, 2001, p. 34)

Implementing an expertise locator system will enable this company to experience similar benefits; it will help solve the immediate need for employees to know who they can contact and also begin to build a foundation for sharing knowledge. Thus it will help them through this period of organizational change, return them to their previous levels of productivity, and prepare them for future collaboration and further operational improvements.

References

Becerra-Fernandez, I. (2001). Locating expertise at NASA. Knowledge Management Review, 4(4), 34-37.

Kaplan-Leiserson, E. (2003). Do you know. Training and Development, 57(5), 18-19.

Maybury, M., D'Amore, R., & House, D. (2000). Automating the finding of experts. Research Technology Management, 43(6), 12-15.

Maybury, M., D'Amore, R., & House, D. (2002). Awareness of organizational expertise. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 14(2), 199-217.

Smith, H. & McKeen, J. (2006). Development in practice XXII: Expertise location and management: Hope or hype? Communications of AIS, 18, 44-54.

- Robin

Copyright Robin Donnan 2007. All Rights Reserved.
Performance Associates, Inc.

Today we’ll begin exploring the process, people, and technology considerations for implementing an expertise locator system—first with a look into the key process considerations. Each recommendation is supported by research into the experiences of other companies as they implemented similar expertise locator and management systems. In addition to the experiences gleaned from such organizations as the St. Paul Companies, the MITRE Corporation, and NASA, of particular note is the information gained from BP Amoco’s experience (Collison, 1999). BP Amoco’s experience is very relevant as much of their expertise locator experience comes after the merger of British Petroleum and Amoco—similar to the upheaval and change occurring in the company for which this initiative is recommended.

In determining the process for implementing an expertise locator system, it is helpful to consider three main phases—up-front design, initial rollout and implementation, and ongoing maintenance.

During up-front design, it will be critical for the company to first link the use of the system to a business process, work process, or other defined purpose (Harney, 2002, p. 6; Thompson, 2003, p. 12; Smith & McKeen, 2006, p. 50). Experience at other companies has shown that if the problem to be solved is not clearly known—and a corresponding strategy developed to specifically solve that problem—“the level of usage and value of usage is going to be compromised significantly” (Harney, 2002, p. 6). It is also important to be aware of how the principles and perceptions of expertise can present some challenges for manually-populated expertise locator systems. For example, expertise changes and evolves over time, expertise is often distributed across a group of people, and some may be hesitant to provide access to their expertise (Maybury, D'Amore, & House, 2002, p. 214). Thus, the system needs to be designed to address these considerations. In addition, it will be important to the design and success of the system to eliminate self-assessment issues of overstating or understating capabilities, define a required minimum level of information required on each employee, and determine how to solve the issue of employees with the same last name (Becerra-Fernandez, 2001, p. 35). As possible, it would also be desirable to consider having a “humanware solution to expertise location that is really closer to solution resolution” by allowing for questioning of the experts and archiving of the resulting answers (Harney, 2002, p. 6).

During the initial rollout and implementation phase, it is recommended to do a pilot program and include mechanisms for feedback and revisions (Smith & McKeen, 2006, p. 51). In addition, utilizing techniques from the rollout of BP Amoco’s expertise locator system (Connect) would be encouraged:

In order to build momentum, an awareness campaign was mounted by a group of “Connect champions” from a variety of backgrounds… who each believe strongly in the benefits of a connected organization. Posters, competitions, deskdrops, learning fairs and lunchtime publicity booths with digital cameras have all been used to great effect. As token recognition, promotional pens are awarded to good examples with a personal thank you from the program director. The note concludes with a request to encourage their peers to use Connect, and invariably results in a series of conversions in the office of the pen recipient. (Collison, 1999, p. 14)

For ongoing maintenance of the expertise locator system, it will be important for the company to design the process considering both how to maintain expertise information after it has been initially collected and the social factors that go into selecting who someone may ask for assistance (e.g., ability to understand the context of a problem, skill at sharing knowledge, willingness to share, and time available) (Smith & McKeen, 2006, p. 48). The former may be solved through the Technology approach, and the latter solved through the People approach (both described later in this paper). Experience from BP Amoco’s rollout of Connect also shows that to maintain the expertise locator system it can be desirable to appeal to people’s egos and encourage their natural competitive natures:

Among the engaging features of Connect is the “Fifteen minutes of fame” that an employee gains when updating their details. A post-itTM icon on the front screen displays their name and photograph until another employee supplants them by updating their own details. Occasionally staff can even be seen to duel for prominence on the front screen, frivolous perhaps, but the end result is an increased likelihood of current, relevant information – the lifeblood of any knowledge directory. (Collison, 1999, p. 15)

References

Becerra-Fernandez, I. (2001). Locating expertise at NASA. Knowledge Management Review, 4(4), 34-37.

Collison, C. (1999). Connecting the new organization: How BP Amoco encourages post-merger collaboration. Knowledge Management Review, 2(1), 12-15.

Harney, J. (2002). An innovative take on expertise location. Knowledge Management, 6.

Maybury, M., D'Amore, R., & House, D. (2002). Awareness of organizational expertise. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 14(2), 199-217.

Smith, H. & McKeen, J. (2006). Development in practice XXII: Expertise location and management: Hope or hype? Communications of AIS, 18, 44-54.

Thompson, E. (2003). Effective knowledge management in a cost-cutting environment. Knowledge Management Review, 6(1), 12-15.

- Robin

Copyright Robin Donnan 2007. All Rights Reserved.
Performance Associates, Inc.

Today we’ll continue exploring the process, people, and technology considerations for implementing an expertise locator system—now with a look into the key people considerations. Research shows that when considering the people component of implementing an expertise locator system, it is important to understand the underlying philosophies and organization principles so as to be prepared for the human elements that could otherwise cause an expertise locator initiative to fail.

Being sensitive to what participation in an expertise locator system represents to the individual employee and the organization is an important first step. For example, participation in BP Amoco’s Connect system:

…not only represents a way to locate expertise, it also demonstrates the participants’ willingness to be contacted, therefore making all users more collaborative – and approachable. In this sense, the existence and high profile of a product such as Connect reinforces the importance of knowledge-sharing and encourages staff to think consciously about why others may want to contact them and how they can help people find them. This thought process prompts a knowledge-sharing culture at a critical time for the newly-merged organization. (Collison, 1999, p. 13)

In addition, to encourage a culture of trust, it is recommended to “establish employee ownership” and not require participation (Collison, 1999, p. 13). Also realize that expertise location can suffer from a lack of participation due to people not wanting to share their contact information and/or self-identify themselves as experts (potentially increasing their workload when asked to share their knowledge) (Smith & McKeen, 2006, p. 45). To address each of these concerns that the employees may have, it will be important for this company to consider these issues when creating the communication plan for the initiative as well as the overall change management strategy being pursued to address the recent and future organizational changes.

“Human facilitation [of the process also] is essential” (Smith & McKeen, 2006, p. 51). One approach to doing this would be to define groups of experts with identified leads. At first these leads would take a visible role in promoting and participating in the expertise locator system; the leads could also be the initial point of contact for any requests for experts and/or questions on that area of expert knowledge. As the company matures in its move toward a knowledge-sharing culture, these groups of experts could also form the basis of future communities of practice. Another benefit of having expert groups and leads identified would be a reduction in the potential “cold-start problem.”

Systems often suffer from the cold-start problem where there is a mismatch between the number of experts and users. In some cases, experts out number users, discouraging experts' participation or affecting revenue. In other cases, there is a dearth of experts (or qualified experts), and users become frustrated because of poor response times or low-quality answers. (Maybury, D'Amore, & House, 2002, p. 203)

To further counteract this issue, as well as help with some of the previously-stated people concerns, it will also be important to secure participation from senior management and key individuals across the organization. Management’s leading by example will help with the initial and ongoing acceptance and usage of the system.

Despite these efforts, it is important to know that some people will hold tenaciously to the belief that their personal networks are enough (Smith & McKeen, 2006, p. 51). Thus, work may need to be done to help employees realize the potential limitations in their personal networks. For example, short training sessions could demonstrate the potential of the system by comparing examples of who their personal network would identify to solve a problem versus who the system points them to (Cullen & Rumizen, as cited in Smith & McKeen, 2006). Examples such as this will likely show that the system can point the employee to many more (and perhaps better) resources in the new, combined organization rather than what their old (and perhaps now outdated) personal networks would have.

References

Collison, C. (1999). Connecting the new organization: How BP Amoco encourages post-merger collaboration. Knowledge Management Review, 2(1), 12-15.

Maybury, M., D'Amore, R., & House, D. (2002). Awareness of organizational expertise. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 14(2), 199-217.

Smith, H. & McKeen, J. (2006). Development in practice XXII: Expertise location and management: Hope or hype? Communications of AIS, 18, 44-54.

- Robin

Copyright Robin Donnan 2007. All Rights Reserved.
Performance Associates, Inc.

Today we’ll continue exploring the process, people, and technology considerations for implementing an expertise locator system—now with a look into the key technology considerations. In defining and selecting the technology for implementing an expertise locator system, it is important to consider the following features:

1. Select technology that is compatible with and “integrated into…legacy information systems” (Thompson, 2003, p. 14).

2. Like NASA’s Expert Seeker system, “provide a unified interface to access competencies within the organization, such as completed academic and non-academic courses, past projects and other relevant knowledge” (Becerra-Fernandez, 2001, p. 34).

3. At a minimum, select a tool that helps people locate one another’s expertise. Ideally, select a tool that can also expand to provide question and answer functionality (including archiving of those answers) to provide support for the growth of future expert communities.

4. Select a product that has a flexible and robust search engine, e.g., select one that “uses text fields to search for employees based on their fields of expertise, names, or other applicable search fields…[such as] intellectual property, skills, competencies and proficiency levels” (Becerra-Fernandez, 2001, p. 35).

5. Have a taxonomy or thesaurus developed from the beginning to help organize the areas of expertise and thus the system. In doing so, also aim to strike a “balance between a structured taxonomy of expertise areas and the anarchy of a free-form entry…[because] if there is too much structure staff feel constrained by ‘box-ticking’” (Collison, 1999, p. 12). At the same time, be careful to not let the taxonomy structure be so limited as to hurt the precision of the system and its search results (Dooley, Corman, & McPhee, 2002, p. 227).

6. Give the users the ability to “build it themselves” without having to rely on programmers or system experts (Thompson, 2003, p. 14). Consider a technology approach that utilizes personal home pages employees can easily create themselves. For example, employees could “upload photographs and resumes; choose from an evolving list of expertise categories; note their contracts and network affiliations; write as much as they need to; and link to other Web-based items of relevance – both intranet and Internet” (Collison, 1999, p. 12).

While some researchers (Maybury, D'Amore, & House, 2000, p. 13; Becerra-Fernandez, 2001, p. 35) indicate it would be preferable to select a system that has data mining and other automation features to keep the expert database current, for speed and ease of implementation it is recommended that this company start with a manually-populated system at first. To enable easier migration to a data mining approach in the future, it will be helpful to have the company’s intranet team ensure that they are gathering authorship meta-data (e.g., who developed and who else contributed) for all documents and tools posted on the intranet. Once data mining is added, it will aid in keeping the information contained in the system current (e.g., through mining for contributions to the company intranet and/or documents on shared drives).

References

Becerra-Fernandez, I. (2001). Locating expertise at NASA. Knowledge Management Review, 4(4), 34-37.

Collison, C. (1999). Connecting the new organization: How BP Amoco encourages post-merger collaboration. Knowledge Management Review, 2(1), 12-15.

Dooley, K., Corman, S., & McPhee, R. (2002). A knowledge directory for identifying experts and areas of expertise. Human Systems Management, 21(4), 217-227.

Maybury, M., D'Amore, R., & House, D. (2000). Automating the finding of experts. Research Technology Management, 43(6), 12-15.

Thompson, E. (2003). Effective knowledge management in a cost-cutting environment. Knowledge Management Review, 6(1), 12-15.

- Robin

Copyright Robin Donnan 2007. All Rights Reserved.
Performance Associates, Inc.

To wrap up our discussion of how to implement an expertise locator system, today we’ll turn our attention to what needs to be done to ensure the success of such an initiative.
To ensure the ultimate success of this expertise locator initiative, many factors needs to be considered in selecting the previous process, people, and technology approaches.

Referring to Davenport and Prusak’s (2000) critical success factors, it is clear that one critical success factor that will benefit this project is having a highly-accessible and consistent technology infrastructure. Fortunately, the target company has already invested heavily in their corporate intranet and it is well-accepted by employees as an important source of information and knowledge.

In a comparison of different authors’ critical success factors for knowledge management, it is interesting to note that both technology infrastructure and willingness to share are the top two items listed (Alazmi & Zairi, 2003). This [combined with other points made during the People portion of this paper] illustrates that the willingness of employees to enter their information in the expertise locator system will be equally important to the success of the project. As this company has recently undergone a period of re-organization, layoffs, and now a merger, there pre-exists a strong corporate need for people to know who they can now contact to answer their questions. The new organization is also much leaner than the previous, making access to individuals with the desired area(s) of expertise more challenging for employees. Thus, there will be a strong pull encouraging use of the system. In addition, it would be recommended to undertake efforts to encourage individual participation by maximizing the key variables that encourage individual participation such as perceived support from colleagues and supervisors, availability and quality of the system, and the perception of rewards and positive outcome from participation (Cabrera, Collins, & Salgado, 2006).

To further ensure the success of the project, the two critical success factors of technology and sharing—as well as supporting factors that bridge the two—must be maximized (Hariharan & Cellular, 2005). For example, the technology and processes must be simple. The relevance of this initiative to the business must be explicitly stated. Senior management must publicly support the initiative (verbally and with active participation). Those who participate should be rewarded and recognized. Sharing of benefits or anecdotal success stories should be featured informally and in intranet articles so as to further drive current and future participation.

Conclusion and Next Steps

An expertise locator system designed and built with careful consideration of the various process, people, and technology considerations outlined herein will help this company solve the immediate need for employees to know who they can contact—as well as begin to build a foundation for sharing knowledge.

It will also be important that this knowledge management initiative is the first in a series of efforts to encourage this newly restructured company to adopt a more knowledge-sharing culture (Davenport & Prusak, 2000). In fact, the need for multiple processes to make the overall strategy work was cited as important to the success of a number of expertise locator and management systems (Mayburry, D’Amore, & House, 2002; Thompson, 2003; “Sharing Knowledge,” 1997). Potential next steps for this company would include conducting a knowledge fair, building an organization-wide base of knowledge champions, completing a knowledge audit, and developing a formal knowledge strategy.

Thus, by making the expertise locator system a first step toward having a knowledge and learning strategy in place that meets the needs of this newer and leaner company, they will be able to help ease the challenges of the recent series of organizational changes as well as ensure a quick return to operational efficiencies and future innovations.

References

Alazmi, M. & Zairi, M. (2003). Knowledge management critical success factors. Total Quality Management & Business Excellence, 14(2), 199-204.

Cabrera, A., Collins, W., & Salgado, J. (2006). Determinants of individual engagement in knowledge sharing. International Journal of Human Resource Management, 17(2), 245-264.

Davenport, T. & Prusak, L. (2000). Working knowledge: How organizations manage what they know (Paperback ed.). Boston: Harvard Business School Press. (Original work published 1998)

Hariharan, A. & Cellular, B. (2005). Critical success factors for knowledge management. Knowledge Management Review, 8(2), 16-19.

Maybury, M., D'Amore, R., & House, D. (2002). Awareness of organizational expertise. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 14(2), 199-217.

Sharing knowledge through BP's virtual team network. (1997). Harvard Business Review, 75(5), 152-153.

Thompson, E. (2003). Effective knowledge management in a cost-cutting environment. Knowledge Management Review, 6(1), 12-15.

- Robin

Copyright Robin Donnan 2007. All Rights Reserved.
Performance Associates, Inc.

It’s often been said that most systems fail because system builders ignore organizational behavior problems. The issue is why does this happen and what can be done about it? Based on what I’ve observed on new system projects in organizations, my initial answer would be because it is often easier to change code than it is to change the behavior of individuals (let alone organizations). Systems are concrete and much more easily modified than the subjective and ever-changing nature of people. Systems don’t have personal agendas, nor do they resist change or take a long time to accept change; you also don’t have to gain their support or commitment. Individuals and organizations, on the other hand, require this and more.

Influencing the ultimate success or failure of a system implementation are such factors as user involvement and influence, management support, level of complexity/risk, and management of the implementation process itself—along with the design, cost, operations, and data of the system itself (Laudon & Laudon, 2006, 552). Of these four main factors, organizational behavior influences three of them. Insufficient user involvement, lack of management support, and poorly managed projects (often due to inexperience or excessive optimism) can be the organizational behaviors that most typically derail the successful implementation of a new system.

Another important element of bridging the IT-user divide is education of both parties. For example, IT needs to understand and embrace the importance of user-centered design (and not dread user input). And users need to understand that while anything is possible with technology, not everything will or should be done. Many users on system design teams seem to struggle with this concept in particular (which furthers IT's frustrations). Instead, IT can help educate users on the trade-offs and realities of system design and development, and work hard to include them in the decision making for what functionality and improvements will and won't be implemented.

And finally, some might argue that as new systems are developed there is no way to determine how the organization will react to it. To the contrary! By involving users throughout the design and development process, you can gain significant insights into how the organization will react to the new system. Involving key stakeholders and decision makers from all the targeted user groups also can help. Furthermore, selecting key members from these user groups (who are supportive of the system and its associated business process changes) to act as champions for the new system will thereby further assist with the change management and system acceptance process. Bottom line, most employees want their company to succeed. If a system can be shown to help the business, that upper management supports, it, and that the business/users were heard in the creation of that system, then the chances for organizational acceptance are much greater.

References:

Laudon, K. & Laudon, J. (2006). Management Information Systems: Managing the Digital Firm. Ninth edition. Pearson/Prentice Hall: Upper Saddle River, NJ.

- Robin

Copyright Robin Donnan 2007. All Rights Reserved.
Performance Associates, Inc.