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A particularly relevant and promising technology that is increasingly being used to support new organizational forms is groupware. However, the potential of groupware technologies to
enable dramatic changes in organizational structures and processes seems to be hard to realize in practice. While there are numerous reasons for these difficulties, we believe that a major influence on the
effective implementation and use of groupware technologies is the change strategy used to manage them. Specifically, we believe that top-down,
planned, strategies for implementing new information technologiesin which each step of the change is defined in advance and the organization then strives to implement these changes as planned in a specified
period of timeare not particularly useful for the new class of open-ended and customizable technologies such as groupware. Instead, we propose an improvisational strategy around groupware technologies which
accommodates and encourages ongoing organizational learning, experimentation and discovery with the new technology, and allows organizations to respond to and even leverage unanticipated outcomes. We
illustrate the value of this strategy by describing the experiences of an organization which successfully managed changes in its customer service operations through the implementation and use of the Notes
groupware technology. We conclude by considering some of the conditions under which an improvisational change strategy may be most effective. |
