Lessons Learned using a Technology Transition Model with the US Navy

There are several thousand group support systems (GSS) installations worldwide, and while that number is growing, This article presents a 32-month qualitative field investigation of an effort to introduce GSS into the daily work of the staff of the US Navy’s Commander, Third Fleet (C3F). Using the principles of action research, the project began with interventions based on the precepts of Davis’ [8] Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). The goal of the interventions was to engender sufficient acceptance for GSS to create a self-sustaining, growing community of GSS users. TAM was revised based on insights that emerged in the field. The resulting model, the Technology Transition Model (TTM), frames acceptance as a multiplicative function of the magnitude and frequency of the perceived netvalue of a proposed change, moderated by the perceived net-value associated with the transition period itself. Introduction More than 15 years of research in the lab and in the field have shown that, under certain conditions, GSS can substantially improve team productivity [32;11;23;19;29;22;10;16;30;15]. There are now several thousand GSS installations worldwide, and that number is growing, but GSS has not yet achieved widespread acceptance in the workplace. At least part of the reason may be that it can take three years or more for an organization to complete a transition to GSS. We define transition as the period of time that starts when some person in an organization expresses interest in using a new technology and ends when a community of users has become self-sustaining. Long transition times may inhibit the widespread use of GSS technology in several ways. The technology may evolve faster than it can be assimilated into daily work practices. Short-term 0-7695-0001-3/99 $10. financial constraints may dry up the resources required to sustain transition. Technology champions and experienced users may move on to other positions, leaving the technology to languish and die. Short transitions may mean more immediate benefit to the organization and more immediate return on the investment made by the technology creators, which may, in turn, lead to further technological advances. It may therefore be useful to understand why some technologies transition quickly, while others transition slowly, and why the same technology transitions quickly in some organizations and slowly in others Overview of the Investigation This article presents a 32-month qualitative field investigation of an effort to introduce GSS into the daily work processes of the staff the U.S. Navy’s Third Fleet aboard the USS CORONADO. The principals of action research guided the investigation. With action research, one starts with a theory, and intervenes in a situation to improve both the situation and the theory [4;9]. This project began with interventions based on the precepts of Davis’ [8] Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). The goal of the interventions was to engender sufficient acceptance for GSS to create a selfsustaining, growing community of GSS users. The members of the research team had extensive experience with GSS. Beyond that they had a rich diversity of backgrounds. The team had extensive experience with previous GSS transition efforts at many organizations. The team members had facilitated thousands of GSSsupported meetings before the study presented here began. The value of TAM for predicting user acceptance and use has been supported by a number of empirical studies [6;8;20;21;24;1;7;31;28]. TAM was originally developed to predict futuretechnology-use after the first hour of exposure.