Value Assessment by Potential Tool
Adopters:
Towards a Model that Considers Costs,
Benefits and Risks of Adoption
Timothy C. Lethbridge
SITE, University. of Ottawa
[email protected]
Technical proposals to encourage
software tool adoption
•
Make tools understandable, robust and complete
[Tilley]
•
Make tools integrated, responsive and flexible
[Martin]
•
Build on top of tools that provide cognitive
support
[Müller]
ACSE 2004 - Edinburgh
Timothy C. Lethbridge
2
Key weakness with technical
solutions:
•
Excellent technical solutions are often not
adopted
E.g.
Lots of people don’t adopt styles in word
processors
E.g. Many features of spreadsheets go unused
•
In both these cases
There
is lots of cognitive support
The features are usable
Those who do adopt the features love them
ACSE 2004 - Edinburgh
Timothy C. Lethbridge
3
Others have proposed looking at
social solutions
E.g., Favre suggests to focus on
Administration
• Training
• Vendor dependence
•
ACSE 2004 - Edinburgh
Timothy C. Lethbridge
4
However …
Maybe we need to look more broadly
at the vast literature on adoption of
technology in general …
ACSE 2004 - Edinburgh
Timothy C. Lethbridge
5
E.T. Rogers reviews what is known
about adoption
In his book “Diffusion of Innovation”
Now in fifth edition
• Dicusses the vast literature on adoption in all
technolgical domains
•

ACSE 2004 - Edinburgh
Timothy C. Lethbridge
6
Rogers’ stages of adoption
Knowledge stage
•
Aware of existence of innovation
Persuasion stage
•
Form favorable or unfavorable attitude
Decision stage
•
Consciously or subconsciously consider factors
May
lead to trial use or more intense use
This is the focus of this talk
An adopter’s perception is key at all stages
ACSE 2004 - Edinburgh
Timothy C. Lethbridge
7
We will divide decision factors
into three categories
Perceived Costs of Use (pCu)
•
What they adopter perceives will be negative
effects of adoption
Perceived Benefits of Use (pBu)
•
Perceptions of positive effects
You would expect adoption if pBu > pCu
But:
Risks of Use (Ru) hold back the adopter
ACSE 2004 - Edinburgh
Timothy C. Lethbridge
8
Costs of Use - Up Front
- Up-front financial cost
One of the biggest obstacles against exploration
• Research shows that innovations are more
adoptable if they can be
•
Divided
Partially
adopted
- Cost of hardware, support etc
- Time to install, configure, convert, etc.
- Time to learn
ACSE 2004 - Edinburgh
Timothy C. Lethbridge
9
Costs of Use - Ongoing
- Incremental extra time to use the technology
- Cost of being different from others
- Cost to maintain, update, etc.
ACSE 2004 - Edinburgh
Timothy C. Lethbridge
10
Benefits of Use
- Incremental time saved when doing the
immediate task
- Time saved in the long run
•
E.g. ability to find information faster later
- Value of increased work quality
ACSE 2004 - Edinburgh
Timothy C. Lethbridge
11
Risks of Use
- Risk that cost will be greater than expected
- Risk that benefit will be less than expected
- Risk of negative unexpected side effects
- Risk if inability to revert on failure
- Risk that support will be poor or dropped
- Risk of encountering defects
- Risk that the tool will not allow the user to do
the task the way they want
- Risk that the adopter will not be able to tell
whether there were any benefits
ACSE 2004 - Edinburgh
Timothy C. Lethbridge
12
The value proposition
Users subconsciously evaluate factors such as
those discussed
They must come to believe roughly and
subconsciously that:
pBu > (pCu * (1 + pROI)
Where pROI is the perceived return on
investment required to account for the risks
ACSE 2004 - Edinburgh
Timothy C. Lethbridge
13
Places where we have seen this
model in operation
Adoption is easier for new hires
In our Mitel studies, it was almost always new
hires who adopted our tools
They have to adopt some tool
• There is much less risk involved in adopting a
technology
•
They
do not risk throwing away their expertise for
something unknown
ACSE 2004 - Edinburgh
Timothy C. Lethbridge
14
The model in action …
Reluctance to adopt certain CASE tools
Initial costs were too high
• Conversion costs high
• Risk of being unable to transition to another tool
• Users feared specific risks
•
Usability:
Initial experiments were not promising
Ability to do the task as they wanted: Tool
appeared inflexible
ACSE 2004 - Edinburgh
Timothy C. Lethbridge
15
The model in action …
Adoption of tools in office products
Perceived benefits
Low learning time
• Lower cost
•
Perceived risks
Updates to office products might orphan the tool
• Becoming trapped in a certain data format
•
ACSE 2004 - Edinburgh
Timothy C. Lethbridge
16
What can we learn from this?
Adoption is a multi-faceted problem
There is much research on technology adoption
in general
Can be applied to software
• Some points in this paper extend Roger’s points
•
We should consider trying to increase benefits
and counteract all classes of costs and risks
ACSE 2004 - Edinburgh
Timothy C. Lethbridge
17
Thank -you
QUESTIONS?
ACSE 2004 - Edinburgh
Timothy C. Lethbridge
18
ACSE 2004 - Edinburgh
Timothy C. Lethbridge
19