| Abstract: |
Group Support Systems (GSS) technology is still in the early stages of its
diffusion process. There are several thousand GSS installations worldwide, and that number
is growing, but GSS have not yet achieved a mass market. It may be that studying adoption
and diffusion of GSS within a single organization could yield insights that would help
speed the process elsewhere. This paper presents an 18-month field study of an
effort to introduce GSS into the daily work efforts of several components of the staff of
the U.S. Navy’s Commander, Third Fleet (COMTHIRDFLT). An internal champion
spearheaded the innovation effort with the assistance of a team of outside GSS experts.
The paper presents background COMTHIRDFLT, and then describes the steps the team took to
create a self-sustaining community of GSS users. The paper presents a summary of the
causes of and the barriers to adoption observed during the study in a causal model of
adoption and diffusion, and concludes with implications for practitioners and researchers. |