Our Technology Diffusion Team

I’ve been reading an excellent book by Everett Rogers titled the Diffusion of Innovation which was recommended to me by our excellent consultant on change and technology Larry Edelman. Rogers writes about how innovations of every kind diffuse through culture and the challenges of trying to diffuse any particular innovation. One of the particular things of interest that he discusses is that a change has to include two people who move the innovation along. (I’m paraphrasing here, so my apologies to Rogers). In the case of a technology like blogs for example, one person would be the geek girl, which would be me. That person is the expert in the actual technology who gets it working, trains people, and gets it integrated into the culture. You could say that I’m doing that with this blog as I’m the first person on our staff to do a work blog.

The other person involved has more of a leadership role in that they need to be someone trusted by the staff and who can convince them to try a new technology. As you may know, if you are the techie sort, we are often dismissed because people can easily say “oh it’s just that Cybele again, she’s a tech diva and I can’t do that kind of stuff.” But if it’s one of their colleagues who is more like them in terms of experience with technology, they may feel more safe in trying something new out. So in our workplace, I ask my director to take on this role because people follow her attitude and lead when it comes to technology. It’s not that I’m not respected for my knowledge – of course I am – it’s that my knowledge seems to advanced for most people to be able to relate to.

As part of my readings on the subject, I started a Technology Diffusion Team at our workplace last year and we’ve been working toward bringing a variety of new technologies on line so that all our staff have a comfortable working knowledge. Some of these are fairly low tech actually, like using a common PowerPoint format for all presentations, and others more challenging such as getting a webcam on every laptop so that all our staff can do presentations on Adobe Connect webcasts more effectively. I’ve recently written an article on using webcams as a tool for collaboration and training because I found that most people still think of them as fun toys for chatting online, and don’t realize the many uses they have in the workplace.