Technology bullies or friends?

Technology bullies or friends?

Last week we focused on decisions and decided to write an entire blogpost about a decision. The blogpost ended stating that technology companies should find ways to innovate technologies that bring a process and structure to organizational decision making. But then what? New technologies, however well built, face major adoption challenges in companies.

The most apparent reason for adoption challenges among people and end users is that the technologies nowadays are aiming to digitalize work. And digitalize is a fancy word for documenting and storing in ‘the cloud’ for beyond our presence in a company. This evokes a very basic fear in business surroundings, especially at a time of economic uncertainty: the fear of being replaceable.

However, this fear is grounded in the fear of the new because let’s face it: we anyways tend to document our work in one way or another. No matter where we go we leave behind a trace of our knowledge, this might be just explaining why we do what we do to a manager in an email. Emails don’t dissolve automatically.  It’s time for a general self confidence boost in knowledge workers. The likelihood that we are replaceable just because you have documented how you do something is very low. If I write down for you how to ride a bike, you won’t necessarily be able to ride a bike. You still need to have the skills.

New technologies in companies are often just seen as just another IT project and are met with skepticism to say the least. And truth be told, don’t we all remember sometime we were involved in implementing some new system at work? If you don’t, be happy you are missing out on this trauma. In fact even good old Customer Relationship Management systems, one would think a business standard, are facing major adoption challenges. From whom? Naturally from the people that the system is supposed to help. In fact this is a common problem for any innovative company. The reason why people have such bad memories of implementing new technologies and why innovative technology companies face major adoption challenges lies in one thing, and one thing only: human nature. We humans just don’t like change. And if one day somebody wants us to move from our million row excels to some fancy schmancy CRM, or wants to make us change our organizational decision making we become mildly said reluctant.  And anyone who has watched Mad Men knows that reluctance to new technology is potentially only the beginning. In one  episode a new IBM computer arrives to Sterling & Cooper and in turn the young copywriter Ginsberg becomes, quite plainly said, crazy.

But don’t get all Ginsberg at the sight of a new tool that might float into your office. Technology companies can’t simply focus on building a new product and wishing it will adopt itself. This is the key difference when we look at new products in the private realm, like Instagram. Nobody is making us take countless food pictures, but at the same time this is a behavioral change that I do voluntarily, nobody decided I need to use Instagram.

This is why the key for technology companies is to not just stop at product innovation but find ways to carefully implement and train their customers on the new tool and allow enough space for learning, patience and trial and error. It’s all about creating a thoughtful adoption process that puts the people in the center.