Groupware Adoption in a Distributed Organization: Grassroots vs. Management Mandate

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.