Is Your IT ROI as Good as it Can Get?
Today’s fast-paced markets keep companies busier than ever trying to stay ahead of their competitors. To keep its competitive edge sharp, a business must not only constantly adapt its strategies to market changes, but also its technologies and its people.
According to the 2005 MIS Quarterly article “A Comprehensive Conceptualization of the Post-Adoptive Behaviors Associated with Information Technology Enabled Work Systems,” most organizations have invested heavily in information technology over the past 25 years. The problem that many organizations face is not lack of technology, but a lack of employee adaptation to the new technology.
“Our observation is that only a bare minimum of the actual functionality of the new technology is used,” says the paper’s co-author, Mays’ ‘Jon (Sean) Jasperson, assistant clinical professor of information and operations management. “Most IT users apply a narrow band of features, operate at low levels of feature use, and rarely initiate extensions of the available features.”
Companies gain a return on their investment of IT applications only when employees understand and use several application functions. If individuals are more proficient with IT applications, they will most likely be more productive and that, in turn, helps their company gain a higher return on its initial IT application investment.
This means organizations need to aggressively encourage users to expand their use of installed IT-enabled work systems.
If an employee only uses, for example, 10 functionalities of a large-scale IT system, but using 15 would double that employee’s productivity, then Jasperson says it is in the organization’s best interest to find ways to give the employee incentive to learn those new technology functionalities. So how do organizations do that?
The paper describes interventions, from examples set by peers to mandates from management, that can break the cycle of an employee’s normal technology use. Individuals and their peers can explore new functions and challenge others to reconsider their use of technology.
But the best ways for a manager to ensure fuller technology use and enhance effectiveness is to ensure expert intervention, giving employees contact with IT experts or requesting software designed to stimulate user learning. And, of course, management can intervene by requiring employees to use a specific functionality or by establishing a reward system that encourages individuals to demonstrate their knowledge of new technologies.
“We recommend that organizations strongly consider capturing users’ post-adoptive behaviors, over time, at a feature level of analysis,” says Jasperson. Organizations need to study use that goes on for a year or two after the initial use, he explains, to help management understand and best develop the long-term IT use behavior of their employees.
Jasperson’s research interests include the adoption, use, management and implementation of information technology in organizational settings. His teaching emphasis is on systems development and database management systems.
— Alycia C. Zuehlke
