This article explores one of the reasons why people often choose the wrong
technology for their independence.

kelly

from the financial Times

   22 Mar 99
Managing use not technology: a view from the trenches.

Summary
The IT productivity paradox arises from the fact that companies
spend billions on IT with no commensurate increase in
productivity. Yet according to Wanda Orlikowski, the paradox is
misconceived: we should expect returns from the use of technology
not technology itself. Drawing on the work of social scientists
Chris Argyris and Donald Schon, the author distinguishes between
espoused technologies what companies buy and install and
technologies-in-use what employees actually use. For example, a
company that invests in groupware might look at the number of
user accounts and judge the project to be a success; but if no
one actually uses the technology to share knowledge because of a
competitive, individualistic culture, say then the company will
not see the returns it anticipates. The problem is that we are
not very good at managing technology use. Businesses must
dedicate resources over time to help employees develop effective
use habits; use of technology rather than technology itself
should be evaluated, and innovative uses of IT should be
rewarded.
Every year billions of dollars are spent on information
technologies in companies worldwide. I study what people actually
do with all those technologies once they have been installed. And
from my view in the trenches, recent talk about the IT
productivity paradox (that the increased investment in IT is not
producing increased productivity) is missing a central and simple
point that expecting any return on IT may be part of the problem.
What we should look for instead is a return on the use of IT; IT
in itself cannot increase or decrease productivity, only use of
it can. This may sound like semantic hair-splitting but how we
talk has deep implications for how we think and act. By
emphasising technology in our talk, we have tended to emphasise
it in our allocation of attention, resources and measures. Such a
focus has come at the expense of understanding what happens in
the trenches what people actually do with technology in their
day-to-day activities.
Vision and reality
Over the past few years, I have had the opportunity of studying a
pioneering technology Notes, from Lotus Development Corporation
as it has been adopted and used in many organisations. Notes was
designed to facilitate collaboration among people, in contrast to
more common software tools that emphasise transaction processing
or individual productivity. Interest in Notes has been high, as
has the motivation to enable people to work together across time,
space and fields of expertise. In the companies I studied in
Europe and the US managers painted compelling visions of how the
technology would bring profound transformations in how, when and
where work would be done.
Yet with a few exceptions, many of these companies have so far
failed to realise their visions not because their visions are
inappropriate (they are not), not because the technology is
immature (it is not), and not because implementation strategies
have been inadequate (they have not been), but because they have
failed to manage the most critical determinant of technology
effectiveness in organisations: how people use it to get work
done.
By neglecting technology use, we forget that technology is not
valuable, meaningful or consequential by itself; it only becomes
so when people engage with it in practice. Such neglect
encourages us to make simplistic assumptions that if people have
technology they will use it, that they will use it as designed,
and that such use will produce the expected outcomes. On
reflection, most of us would agree that such assumptions are
naive or faulty. Indeed, our own experiences with technology
reveal that we do not passively follow the dictates of machines
or of their designers specifications. Rather, we constantly make
choices about whether, how, when, where and for what purposes to
use technology. When the order entry system slows to a crawl at
peak times, we bypass it. When our car exhaust breaks, we
improvise a repair with a bent coathanger. When we want to use a
spreadsheet, we learn the basic functions we need and ignore the
rest. We are purposive, knowledgeable, adaptive and inventive
agents who engage with technology to accomplish various and
changing ends. Where technology does not help us achieve those
ends, we abandon it, or work around it, or change it, or think
about changing our ends.
As users, we know this about our use of technology. But as
managers, we believe that if we can just get the right set of
tools, more user-friendly interfaces, better training and
support, and closer alignment with business processes, then use
(as anticipated) will surely follow, along with the expected
outcomes. Because of such beliefs, we concentrate resources,
attention and effort on getting the right technologies in the
right place at the right time. Unfortunately this effectively
ignores right use. For example, look at the budget for new
systems development and see what percentage of resources is
allocated to the initial analysis, design, installation and
training activities, and what percentage is earmarked for
supporting long-term use. Where the up-front budget exceeds the
day-to-day budget, there are insufficient means both initially
and over time for users to incorporate the technologies
effectively into their work practices. Two types of technology
In how we manage and measure, we have tended to focus on the hard
stuff technology, with its tangibility, relative stability and
predictability of performance and to downplay the soft stuff the
everyday use of technology, with its more open-ended, more
variable, and less tangible outcomes. This tendency to favour the
more tangible and stable over the less tangible and more variable
is a common error. In the area of learning, social scientists
Chris Argyris (of Harvard University) and Donald Schon (of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology), have referred to this
tendency by distinguishing between espoused theories (what we say
about how we act) and theories-in-use (what our actions reveal
about how we act). They note that people are usually unaware of
the discrepancy between these, and a fundamental aspect of
learning is recognising and dealing with it. I suggest that we
can similarly differentiate between espoused technologies (the
technologies we buy and install in our offices, factories and
homes) and technologies-in-use (the technologies we actually
use). Espoused technologies are the bundles of hardware and
software that consistently provide a given set of predefined
features. Technologies-in-use are the specific features we engage
with in particular ways depending on our skills, tasks, attention
and purposes.
What we buy is given and predefined (espoused technology); what
we use is contingent and local (technology-in-use). The two are
not the same, and managing and measuring the former as if it were
the latter can lead to difficulties.
Some examples may help. One of the companies I studied in my
Lotus Notes research was a multinational consultancy which had
adopted the technology to facilitate knowledge sharing among its
consultants. The managers implementing Notes were very impressed
with its technical sophistication, believing it to be what we
might now call a killer app. They concentrated their energies and
resources on installing Notes within the firm's infrastructure
and on every consultant's PC. And their measurements number of
user accounts established, number of servers installed, number of
databases created indicated that the technology was implemented
successfully.
Managing and measuring espoused technology, these managers did
not attend much to the technologies-in-use to what consultants
were actually doing with Notes in their everyday practice. If
they had, they would have found that consultants were not using
Notes to share knowledge; either they did not use it at all or
they used it only to transfer files, send memos or access news
bulletins. In the context of this firm, with its competitive up
or out career path and individualistic work norms, to share
knowledge was counter-cultural. Considered as an espoused
technology, Notes certainly had the potential to facilitate
knowledge sharing. However, what matters in assessing the
effectiveness of technology is not espoused technology but
technology-in-use. A similar tale may be told of the research and
development division of a large pharmaceutical company.
Envisioning seamless, cross-functional project integration
through Notes, managers rolled it out to hundreds of scientists
across a number of laboratories. However, this company, like many
others, had a hierarchical structure in which scientists were
rewarded for distinct functional contributions and individual
patent applications. Not surprisingly, they chose to maximise
their personal initiatives and to minimise their participation in
cross-functional work. As a result, their use of Notes was
limited and the company (like many others I continue to encounter
today) failed to realise the potential of its investment in
groupware.
Focusing on espoused technologies rather than technologies-in-use
is not just an issue for corporations; it is also one for
research. Another technology paradox was recently generated by a
report from the HomeNet project, a multi-year research study at
Carnegie Mellon University. The study is examining the internet
usage of about 100 families in Pittsburgh during their first few
years online.
Its current, surprising, findings are that using the internet at
home causes small but reliable declines in social and
psychological well-being. As this project is being conducted with
considerable care by leading social researchers of computing, we
have no reason to disbelieve the results. Yet many find them
disquieting because they are at odds with popular beliefs and
personal experiences.
Users of the Well, for example, a virtual community on the
internet, report quite different experiences. As chronicled by
Howard Rheingold, the American social commentator, members of the
Well offer each other social ties, friendship and emotional
support.
Similarly, American journalist Andrew Lam reports that the
internet is being used to create a global community among the
2.5m Vietnamese displaced by the Vietnam war and now living on
five different continents. Through websites devoted to Vietnamese
history, culture and news, many Vietnamese immigrants have
created a Virtual Vietnam, establishing social links and
reconnecting with their cultural heritage. How can we explain
these different experiences of the same technology? The answer
lies in the difference between espoused technologies and
technologies-in-use. Stories of the Well and Virtual Vietnam are
descriptions of technologies-in-use. The HomeNet project's
measures of internet use number of hours connected to the
internet are measures of espoused technology. They do not tell us
how people actually use the internet whether they surf aimlessly,
shop for books, interact with friends, participate in support
groups and so on.
HomeNet's results would perhaps be less puzzling if presented in
terms of technologies-in-use. The decline in social and
psychological well-being reported by the project may be
associated with the specific technologies-in-use (not yet
described in the research) of the Pittsburgh families; they may
not be result of some general internet use. Other internet
technologies-in-use may produce different social and
psychological outcomes, as suggested by the experiences of Well
users and immigrant Vietnamese. The same distinction between
espoused technologies and technologies-in-use may also help us
make sense of and deal with the broader IT productivity paradox.
Practical consequences
What does this all mean for practice? It suggests that we need to
transfer our energies from primarily managing technology to also
managing the use of technology. It requires us to take seriously
the difference between the technologies we buy and the actual use
that is made of them. While acquiring and implementing
appropriate technology is clearly necessary, that is insufficient
to ensure effective or indeed any use. Taking use seriously
requires managers to dedicate resources to help users build
effective use habits.
For example, my colleagues and I studied the implementation and
use of a new computer conferencing technology in a Japanese
companys product development group. The introduction of the
technology was managed by nine of the group's 150 members. They
not only had the requisite technical knowhow but more
importantly, because they were already accustomed to using the
technology, they had the skills needed to make recommendations
for effective use. The conferencing tool was thus not presented
to users as a new technology, but as a solution to a particular
problem in their work in this case, the co-ordination of product
development activities across six subgroups, two buildings and 17
months.
Taking use seriously requires resources to be available over time
to support not just the evolving technology but also peoples
evolving use. It suggests expecting variation in use over time
and as conditions change. Static use in dynamic circumstances is
ineffective. Shifts in use over time are not deviations to be
corrected but improvisations to be rewarded; managers need to
encourage those innovations that improve practice, yet not punish
those that do not. Taking use seriously assumes that learning
happens through experimentation in, and reflection on, use.
For example, a software company that successfully implemented
Notes to assist customer support, permanently assigned two
technical experts to the customer support department. Their task
was to facilitate users initial adoption and their long-term use
of Notes. The department's managers understood that in practice
and over time, technologies break down, requirements change, use
evolves and learning takes place; so to ensure continued
effective use of Notes in the department, technical experts who
knew, and had credibility with, the users would have to be on
hand. Over time, these experts also became expert in the use of
Notes for customer support, and were able to improve the way it
was deployed to increase the quantity and quality of users
output.
More than anything, managing use rather than technology alone
requires a shift in mindset. Managers must move from managing or
fixing the easy hard stuff the technology to also managing the
harder, more critical soft stuff the way technology is used. In
over a decade of studying the use of IT in the trenches, I have
more often than not seen people exhausting resources and effort
because organisations were managing technologies rather than use.
It need not be so.
Steps towards managing use of technology
l Recognise that the technologies installed in your organisation
are not synonymous with the use of those technologies in
practice.
l Understand that only use of technology can produce
organisational results, and that such use will be both
anticipated and unanticipated. l Help people understand how use
of technology relates to their everyday work processes and
problems.
l Acknowledge that effective use of technology must evolve over
time. l Allocate at least as much attention, effort and resources
to the day-to-day use of technology as to its installation and
maintenance. l Facilitate evolving use through long-term
assignment of resources human, financial and technical.
l Promote evolving use through creating expectations of frequent
change. l Encourage evolving use through supporting innovation
and improvisation in the day-to-day use of technology.
l Reward the effort involved in use innovations, not the outcome.
l Assess the use of technology, not the technology installed.
Countries:  XA World.
 Industry:   P7389 Business Services, NEC.
             P7376 Computer Facilities Management.
             P7379 Computer Related Services, NEC.
             P3575 Computer Terminals.
 Actuary:    Support Services, Information Technology.
 Subject:    Management. Products & Product Use Services &
Service Use.              Technological Developments.
 Types:      Surveys.
 MCC Type:   MGMT  Management & marketing. TECH  Products &
product use.              TECH  Services & service use. TECH
Technology.  People:     Olikowski, Wanda.

The Financial Times
Page 6
Copyright (C) The Financial Times Ltd, 1997


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