IMPLEMENTING NEW TECHNOLOGY

A Dual Role

Those who manage technological change must often serve as both technical developers and implementers. As a rule, one organization develops the technology and then hands it off to users, who are less technically skilled but quite knowledgeable about their own areas of application. In practice, however, the user organization is often not willing—or able—to take on responsibility for the technology at the point in its evolution at which the development group wants to hand it over. The person responsible for implementation—whether located in the developing organization, the user organization, or in some intermediary position—has to design the hand-off so that it is almost invisible. That is, before the baton changes hands, the runners should have been running in parallel for a long time. The implementation manager has to integrate the perspectives and the needs of both developers and users.

Perhaps the easiest way to accomplish this task is to think of implementation as an internal marketing, not selling, job. This distinction is important because selling starts with a finished product; marketing, with research on user needs and preferences. Marketing executives worry about how to position their product in relation to all competitive products and are concerned with distribution channels and the infrastructure needed to support product use.

Adoption of a marketing perspective encourages implementation managers to seek user involvement in the: (1) early identification and enhancement of the fit between a product and user needs, (2) preparation of the user organization to receive the innovation, and (3) shifting of “ownership” of the innovation to users. We discuss the first two of these issues in this section of the article; the third we cover later.

Marketing Perspective

That involving users in a new technology’s design phase boosts user satisfaction is quite well known, but the proper extent, timing, and type of user involvement will vary greatly from company to company. For example, software developers in an electronic office equipment company established a user design group to work with developers on a strategically important piece of applications software when the program was still in the prototype stage. Prospective users could try out the software on the same computer employed by the program’s developers. The extremely tight communication loop that resulted allowed daily feedback from users to designers on their preferences and problems. This degree of immediacy may be unusual, but managers can almost always get some information from potential users that will improve product design.

A marketing perspective also helps prepare an organization to receive new technology. Many implementation efforts fail because someone underestimated the scope or importance of such preparation. Indeed, the organizational hills are full of managers who believe that an innovation’s technical superiority and strategic importance will guarantee acceptance. Therefore, they pour abundant resources into the purchase or development of the technology but very little into its implementation. Experience suggests, however, that successful implementation requires not only heavy investment by developers early in the project but also a sustained level of investment in the resources of user organizations.

A very promising implementation effort in a large communications and computer company went off the rails for many months because of inadequate infrastructure in the user organization. New computerized processing control equipment was ready for shipment to prospective users enthusiastically awaiting its arrival, but a piece of linking software was not in place. Arguments erupted over who should pay for this small but critical piece of the system. Equally troubling, there were no resources for training because the developers did not see providing these resources as part of their normal responsibilities. No one in the user organization had prepared the way for the innovation, so there was no one to whom developers could hand it off.

Framework for Information

Just as marketing managers carefully plan the research through which they will gather critical product information, so implementation managers must develop an iterative, almost accordion-like framework to guide decisions about when and how to collect needed information from all groups affected by an innovation. We say “accordion-like” because the process necessarily involves a search for information, a pause to digest it, and then another active period of search—cycle after cycle. What information is important—and who has it—may vary at different stages of the implementation process, but someone must coordinate the iterative work of gathering it—and that someone is the implementation manager.

When, for example, a turbine manufacturer designed a CNC system for shop-floor control in one of its small parts operations, project managers were careful to:

• Observe the current job routine. System designers visited the factory floor several times and each time interviewed eight to ten operators about their work procedures.

• Pay special attention to those parts of the work that required users to make decisions or seek information about which tools or materials to use, which sequence of steps to follow in machining, and which jobs operators ought to run first.

• Discuss with workers what they found especially frustrating or rewarding about their work. In this case, it turned out that they liked some flexibility in the sequencing of jobs, felt that the choice of materials should be theirs, and were often frustrated by the difficulty of finding tools.

• Examine how this manufacturing process related to others. The machine operators were extremely dependent on materials personnel, maintenance, the tool room, and order expediters.

From their discussions with operators, the system designers could understand the important variables as the operators saw them and, therefore, could design a system that solved problems the operators really faced without creating new ones. These discussions also facilitated a transmission of information back to the users through education and hands-on practice sessions with the users and their supervisors.

By Kingalu Avin

BAPRM 42697