Managing A Reluctant User Base

US headquartered Stinson Leonard Street with 16 offices across the region aims to provide sophisticated transactional and litigation services to clients ranging from individuals and privately held enterprises to national and international public companies. As Chief Information Officer with Stinson Leonard Street, Vic Peterson serves as a trusted advisor and strategic business partner to the firm's leadership.

- Vic Peterson

I work in an environment that is notoriously resistant to technology change: a large law firm. But, law firms are not unique. Overt user resistance is a common challenge at professional service firms, a category that includes organizations that employ doctors, professors, accountants, financial advisors, architects, and even technology consultants.

Why Are Professionals Reluctant to Adopt Technology in the Workplace?

Professionals stake their careers on their reputations. Change in the work environment can mean loss of control, damage to performance, and loss of reputation. Sometimes user skepticism can be extreme. An acquaintance who is a technology executive at a prestigious teaching hospital told me that the implementation of thousands of iPads was held up by one surgeon with significant institutional clout because he did not like the resolution of the X-ray images on the iPad. Fair enough. In that scenario, image resolution could mean life or death. What about the phlebotomist who simply has a checklist to follow or the nurse who is accessing a patient history database that includes mostly text updates? I personally witnessed a professor at a significant business school denigrate the use of PowerPoint by her colleagues. She then proceeded to use an oldfashioned overhead projector with prepared film slides. We all experience these moments, but still, there is a science to the management of such circumstances.

User Acceptance Curve