Get Workers on Board with Emerging Tech Early
The actual adoption of emerging technology isn’t simple. Technical issues aside, buy-in is critical. The traditional methods of bringing employees on board with hardware or process changes work with emerging technology as well. Listen to their concerns, let them participate in the planning and development, and give them ownership of the deployment project, and of the technology itself once it’s up and running.
For example, when the Defense Logistics Agency began installing robotic process automation, its IT staffers found that the bots they were creating looked just like human workers to their networks. The bots logged in the same way with the same security, and did the same work as a human worker. The technology wasn’t the issue.
Instead, what the DLA had to overcome was the reluctance of those human workers, many of whom feared their jobs were going to be lost to automation. The DLA RPA team convinced workers that not only were they not going to lose their jobs, they were going to be able to do more interesting work — and that the bots would fill empty positions that were never going to be filled for budgetary reasons, enabling the department to get more strategic work done.