“I guess I don’t know what I’m doing” – the implications of IT support and training on the worker and the organization
Hannah Rasmussen, University of Western Ontario
Nicole Haggerty, University of Western Ontario
Most organizations today have made large investments in information and communications technologies (ICTs). ICTs are touted as the key to a future of improved productivity and have become intimately tied to the ability of many workers to complete their jobs. ITCs are often a part of a utopian vision in which workers use technology easily and quickly to perform their job. The adoption and use of new ITCs are a main area of MIS research. Within this stream of research the implications and impact of training and support on adoption and systems use has been central. The majority of the research in the field of adoption has focused on the positive way in which training and support can increase adoption and use. However the reality of introduction and daily use of ITCs is not a utopia. They invariably change how work is to done, sometimes with negative consequences. Most of the time the worker’s skills, like the ITCs itself, take on a ‘ready to hand’ character, slipping into the background of the everyday work environment. However, when this technology fails, or the worker is unable to complete a task, their skills and the technology move into the ‘present at hand’. At this moment the work that needs to be done is changed and the worker experiences a breach, or a rupture. Instead of being a worker with a certain known set of technological skills and abilities that they use in their job, they are a worker who is expected to perform a new task, often fixing or using the technology in a new way. At this moment often the worker faces having to be ‘trained’ to use a new system or requires ‘support’ for assistance in getting the new IT to function (and keep functioning) so that work can be accomplished. We believe this situation can rupture a worker’s internally held beliefs about their capabilities in relation to their work and themselves. One of the reactions to this rupture, we believe, is to react negatively to training and support in order to repair their sense of competence and identity self view. Thus training and support may inadvertently be practices which can exacerbate poor or non adoption of IT as workers act. It is this unexplored phenomenon in IT adoption which is the focus of this work.
Specifically, this paper will explore how the worker’s identity and work competence is in conflict with the organizational effort to ‘make things better’ via ITCs which has the inevitable effect of making employees less competent, at least for some period of time. This paper will explore the theoretical implications, using Burke’s Dramatism, of the future of training, support and the worker’s identity.