Probably the biggest problem with new technology is that it requires people to change to get the most out of it.
When you adopt a technology to help solve a problem—like, let’s say team work—it’s not enough to adopt the technology and then use it just like the technology it supplants.
This kind of thinking leads to things like the dreaded e-mail chain, where everybody’s sending e-mails around like they’re little slips of paper. And then a document needs revising, so a Word document gets attached to the e-mails, like it’s a bunch of papers. People open, read, edit, and pass along, exactly like with a piece of paper that gets marked up by different people.
It may still be a win, since sending e-mails is a lot easier, faster, and cheaper than couriering paper around, but it’s still the same old process, only turbocharged.
Because the hard part isn’t using a computer to replace the manual tools—the hard part is to change the workflow. People fear change. Most people at this point have realized the benefits of using a word processor instead of a typewriter, but that doesn’t change the writing process, only the physical act itself.
Which is profoundly sad—the state of computers and networks these days has the potential to revamp the process itself.
One obvious technology that is mature and ready for the masses is shared documents. Let’s use Google’s implementation as an example, since it’s free and polished.
Google Docs lets you host text documents, spreadsheets, and presentations on the Internet, which is great for people who move between different machines a lot, or for people who simply want to be able to work on a document at work, then pick up where they left off at home without resorting to kludges like e-mailing themselves the document or remembering to put it on a flash drive. That’s a win, right there.
But the real win is that other people can be invited to collaborate on the documents. So everybody can change things at the same time. Which means no more e-mailing documents back and forth. No more having to figure out who has the latest version, or the even worse scenario of spending your time editing a document only to find out it’s several versions old and all your work was for naught. Not a good feeling, that.
So why aren’t more teams using technologies like Google Docs when the benefits are so obvious?
Because they require a new process. Why mess with something that works—well, that kind of works—but is grossly inefficient?
This is the challenge for technologists and technology evangelists—getting people to understand why changing the entire workflow is sometimes necessary to get the benefits of the technology. It can be a hard sell.