Groupware Adoption in a Distributed Organization: Grassroots vs. Management Mandate Proposal Gloria Mark Dept. of Informatics University of California, Irvine Irvine, CA 92697-3425, USA +1 949-824-5955
[email protected]
Steve Poltrock The Boeing Company PO Box 3707 MC 7L-49 Seattle, WA 98124-2207, USA +1 425-865-3270
[email protected]
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Abstract Typically, the success of a collaboration technology depends on its adoption by all participants in the collaboration. But as organizations become more distributed (Castells, 1996), the challenge increases to achieve uniform adoption across geographic distance, and across organizational boundaries. In an earlier study, Mark and Poltrock (2001) discovered that the rapid and widespread adoption of data conferencing across the entire Boeing Company occurred as a grassroots effort on the part of the employees. They explained this large-scale grassroots diffusion effort as technology being introduced through individuals’ social worlds in the organization. A typical example of a social world is a distributed team. Boeing has stopped the use of the previous data conferencing service and has now introduced a new kind of data conferencing along with a management mandate. The purpose of this study is to compare the adoption of data conferencing in the large distributed organization as a grassroots effort vs. as mandated by management. The project plan will involve collecting data using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods to provide an overview of the diffusion process. Data collection will involve interviews and surveys that address reasons for adoption of the two data conferencing systems. This methodology will enable us to make comparisons between the two experiences. We will also collect usage data from the data conferencing servers to gain a reasonably good estimate of number of user hours per month. We will specifically examine whether social worlds still exist as the unit of adoption when management mandate occurs. We will also investigate how management mandate affects adoption at different organizational sites with distributed team members who must collaborate. We will investigate how the different efforts relate to adoption in the organizational hierarchy, and will compare the problems that exist for both grassroots and management mandate adoption. These findings will help organizations understand ways to increase technology adoption among employees, which ultimately can make organizations more productive.
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Groupware Adoption in a Distributed Organization: Grassroots vs. Management Mandate Gloria Mark and Steve Poltrock Introduction When an organization wants to implement a new IT system, it generally employs one of two strategies. The first strategy would be to make the technology widely available (e.g. through downloading from the company web pages), and to let the employees adopt the technology by choice through a grassroots process. This strategy relies on employees informing others about the technology, e.g. through word-of-mouth, through use in business meetings, or in the case of a collaborative technology, through the need to collaborate. An alternative and common strategy of implementing an IT system is through management mandate. In this project we compare the efficacy of a management mandate adoption strategy with a grassroots effort, for the case of groupware. This information is valuable because as organizations become more distributed and global, they are increasingly faced with the problem of getting employees to adopt collaborative technologies. This problem is tough because employees who must adopt the same collaborative technology may be distributed around the world. Currently, a number of technologies are available to support collaboration across distance, ranging from asynchronous shared workspaces to synchronous audio, video, and data conferencing. As these technologies mature, their potential users face an unusual technology adoption challenge. Typically, the success of a collaboration technology depends on its adoption by all participants in the collaboration. But as organizations become more distributed (Castells, 1996), the challenge increases to achieve uniform adoption across geographic distance, and across organizational boundaries. Adoption of a technology in a distributed setting involves the coordination of a number of actions: people must inform each other about the technology, coordinate in the decision to use it, and implement it. In a recent study, Mark and Poltrock (2001) discovered that the rapid and widespread adoption of data conferencing across the entire Boeing Company occurred as a grassroots effort on the part of the employees. This was surprising because there was no formal mandate from management encouraging its use and there was no plan to deploy it throughout the enterprise. The information systems organization assigned experts to manage the data conferencing service, but these experts were not chartered to advocate its use, and did not advertise it. They implemented the infrastructure required for reliable data conferencing, and established a website with installation instructions. Adoption depended on employees learning about the technology, finding the website, installing it, and discovering how to use it. Figure 1 shows the total usage per month in user hours from February 1998 through December 2001. As shown in the figure, usage has grown to over 60,000 usage hours. This is a relatively steep technology diffusion curve.
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Figure 1. Estimated NetMeeting diffusion at Boeing over four years.
The Challenge of Adopting Groupware across Distance With data conferencing, people can use a shared whiteboard, share application windows to all other participants, allow others to interact with the shared applications, and send short text messages or files to the other participants. The data conferencing service in this 2001 study was Microsoft NetMeeting. Data conferencing can support virtual collocation in a number of ways. For example, people can join a meeting in a conference room from multiple different geographic locations while sitting at their desktops. They then view the same data as those in the conference room and can interact with all other participants. Or, thirty individuals from company sites around the country, who are members of a task force, can sit at their desktops and collaboratively view and edit a document that they are preparing. People can give remote training by using a power point presentation. In a large conference room across the country, hundreds of people can sit and view a presentation, asking questions through audio conferencing. Mark and Poltrock (2001) explain this large-scale grassroots diffusion effort, as occurring via individuals’ social worlds in the organization. A social world is a unit of collective action (Strauss, 1978). We consider a social world as the unit for adoption of groupware in a distributed organization. A distributed team is a type of social world that normally either adopts a collaborative technology together or not at all. People typically are members of multiple social worlds in the workplace, and they act as bridges between their social worlds. In grassroots adoption, technology diffuses when individuals introduce it into another of their working spheres (see figure 2). As the technology enters another working sphere it can transform as the members in that sphere adapt it to their working practices and conditions. Thus, we propose to use boundaries of work practice as the adoption unit as opposed to other approaches (e.g. diffusion of innovation, Rogers, 1995) which view an organization, a physical work unit, or individual as the locus of impact. Further, we are not focusing on adoption in a single social world, but rather adoption in multiple social worlds that interact in an organization. 4
In fall of 2002, the Boeing company “pulled the plug” on the Netmeeting server, citing that the technology was obsolete and not well-supported. Instead, Boeing chose to switch to WebEx, another data conferencing system. However, another important difference is that WebEx use for virtual collocation is now management mandated, as opposed to being a voluntary grassroots effort, as NetMeeting adoption was.
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Figure 2. A diagram showing how technology diffuses through a distributed organization in a grassroots effort, where social worlds are “seeded” by an individual.
Research Objective The objective of our research is to understand the differences in grassroots vs. managementmandated groupware adoption. We ask the following research questions: • When groupware is mandated, does a social world (e.g. a distributed team) still exist as the unit of adoption? Or rather, is the technology first “adopted” by a business unit of individuals (e.g. the Everett, WA site) who may not necessarily collaborate with each other and use the technology? How does this impact the diffusion of the technology? • What happens when one organizational site (e.g. on the west coast) adopts the technology early, but another organizational site (e.g. in the Midwest) adopts the technology later? How do members of distributed teams from these sites collaborate? • How does grassroots vs. management mandate methods affect adoption for different levels in the hierarchy? E.g. we might expect that middle managers may have the most difficulty in using technology that is mandated by the organization, as they are forced to learn how to use the technology, yet they may not be technically savvy. • How does the rate of diffusion differ in grassroots vs. management mandated groupware? 5
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What problems exist in the adoption of management mandated groupware across distance, and not in grassroots efforts, and vice versa?
Research Plan and Methods Data will be collected using triangulation of quantitative and qualitative methods to provide an overview of the diffusion process and also to examine in more depth the reasons and experiences associated with adoption. We will use a paradigm common in adoption studies: interviews and surveys asking users to recall reasons for adoption. We will send a survey to users across the company. The survey instrument will address reasons for adoption of Netmeeting and WebEx and will enable us to make comparisons. We will conduct follow-up interviews from survey respondents and will interview key people involved in the WebEx technology introduction. We will also collect usage data from the Boeing WebEx conference servers, which shows all the people running data conferencing and indicates who is actively participating in a meeting. From this data, we can gain a reasonably good estimate of number of user hours per month. Project Output We expect to produce the following deliverables from the project: •
A model comparing the differences between grassroots and management mandated groupware adoption across distance. We expect that this model will be fairly generalizable to other organizations.
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Peer-reviewed publications that will appear in top-tier conferences and journals.
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A set of best practices covering social and organizational issues for collaborative technology implementation
Relevance to Partner Companies As distributed work becomes more commonplace in large organizations, IT managers, decisionmakers, and senior management seek ways to enable people to collaborate across distance and conduct their work. Individuals need ways to share and view common data, project teams need methods for discussing their results, and senior executives who do not care to travel need ways to meet efficiently from their local sites. The results of this study are relevant to organizations who must introduce collaborative technologies into their organizations and who depend on the adoption of these technologies to run their business. The results are also relevant to organizations who produce collaborative technologies. We will share the lessons learned from over four years of studying collaborative technology adoption in a large, complex, distributed global company. We will discuss in detail the problems and successful techniques for how groupware can be adopted across distance via both grassroots efforts and management mandate. We feel that this information is valuable to IT organizations, to decision-makers who choose technologies to implement in their organizations, to project managers who depend on their employees utilizing collaborative technologies, and ultimately to CTO’s. 6
Theory and related work There are several contributions of this study that can increase the understanding of collaborative technology adoption. First, there are few studies which have focused on large-scale groupware technology adoption in an organization, and most have found resistance to adoption. Organizational cultures that are incompatible with cooperation hinder employees from adopting collaborative technologies (Orlikowski, 1993) The lack of common ground, collaboration readiness, or collaboration technology readiness among distributed team members can lead to technology resistance (Olson & Olson, 2000). Other factors include an imbalance of benefits to costs within a group (Grudin, 1988), the lack of critical mass (Markus, 1987), and unanticipated extra work for some group members (Rogers, 1994). The organization can constrain and change attitudes towards a collaborative system (Bikson and Eveland, 1996). In contrast, with the evolution of technical features and the realization of collaboration benefits, users have successfully adopted shared electronic calendars (Palen and Grudin, 1995). Second, the distributed nature of organizations has not been a focus of collaborative technology adoption even though adoption has been studied in settings that are distributed (Munkvold and Anson, 2001). A number of studies have examined the adoption of electronic meeting room systems and group decision-support systems (GDSS) (e.g. Bikson and Eveland, 1996). However these groupware systems support users who are collocated. The decision to adopt such systems occurred among users who were mostly located at the same physical site, or while collocated in the same electronic meeting room. Studies of IT diffusion have also seldom addressed the role of distance in adoption, focusing primarily on individual, structural, technological, task-related, and environmental factors (see Kwon and Zmud, 1987, Fichman, 1992, and Prescott and Conger, 1995, for reviews). In a review of 70 studies of technology diffusion in which Prescott and Conger (1995) classified the studies according to their locus of impact, few had discussed the role of distance directly in adoption. Some studies have focused on the effects of organizational differences on adoption, such as organizational climates (e.g. Kwon, 1990), but they have not studied how they relate to distributed work. Others have studied technology adoption based on the work unit as the locus of impact, with the assumption that differences at this level, e.g. history and relationships, are profound enough to explain adoption at a more detailed scale than the organization (Brabston, 1993; Umanath and Campbell, 1994). However, none of these studies proposes that such work units may not be independent, as in the case of adopting technologies to support collaboration between units. At the other extreme are studies investigating inter-organizational adoption, such as BITNET or ISDN which tend to use critical mass as an explanatory factor rather than communication networks or organizational characteristics (e.g. Gurbaxani, 1990). Therefore, there is a lack of research that has studied collaborative technology adoption in distributed organizations. This is surprising given the prevalence of distributed collaboration.
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Project Timetable The project will be conducted over two years, beginning July 2003. J
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Field Work Data Analysis Papers, reports produced Synthesis of work Final project report
Projected Project Cost Item Investigator Mark
Year 1 (2003-04) $10,528
Year 2 (2004-05) $10,528
Research Assistant
$1000
$1000
$1472
$1472
$2000 $15,000
$2000 $15,000
Material and Support • Transcription • Photocopying • Telephone, Fax • Audio tapes Travel • field site (Boeing, Seattle) Total
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Palen, L. and Grudin, J. (1995). Why groupware succeeds: Discretion or mandate? Proceedings of ECSCW’95, 263-278. Prescott, M. B. and Conger, S. A. (1995). Information technology innovations: A classification by IT locus of impact and research approach. Data Base Advances, 26(2&3), pp. 20-41. Rogers, E. M. (1995). Diffusion of Innovations, 4th ed. New York: The Free Press. Rogers, Y. (1994). Exploring obstacles: Integrating CSCW in evolving organizations. Proceedings CSCW’94, 67-78. Strauss, A. (1978). A social worlds perspective. In N. Denzin (ed.), Studies in Symbolic Interaction, vol. 1, Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 119-128. Umanath, N. S. and Campbell, T. L. (1994). Differential diffusion of information systems technology in multinational enterprises: A research model. Information Resources Management Journal, Winter, pp. 6-18.
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