User Design: A case study of corporate change

1. User Design: A case study of corporate change Ray Pastore Penn State University Ph.D. Candidate

2. Purpose/Research Question • Purpose - Examine the effects of User Design in corporate change • Research Question - What are employees perspectives on the user design and corporate change strategies being implemented into their organization? • Qualitative - Case Study Approach - This design approach is described by Merriam (2002) as “The case study is an intensive description and analysis of a phenomenon or social unit such as an individual, group, institution, or community…By concentrating upon a single phenomenon or entity (the case), this approach seeks to describe the phenomenon in depth.” (p. 8).

3. What is User Design? • Holistic • Bottom Up approach to management • Has been described as “…an authentic empowerment of a particular set of stakeholders, the users of any innovation.” (Carr-Chellman, 2007, p. 8). • Stakeholders and Management work together • Share power

4. Systems Theory • Each part is related to the whole (as identified by Carr-Chellman 2007) • Embedded • Interdependent • Interconnection • Self-renewing

5. Change Process • When one part of the system is changed, other parts are affected • Change Theories • Rodger’s Diffusion of Innovations (Rogers, 1964) • Ely’s nature of change and implementation within a system (Ely, 1990)

6. Methodology - Case Study • Qualitative Research Study • Action Based Research (Carr-Chellman, Cuyar, Breman, 1998) • Participants - Users, Designers, Management • Data Collection - Interview, Document Analysis • Analysis - Coding/Analyzing

7. Case Presented • Background • Fortune 100 company with over 50,000 employees • Previously using a top-down approach to management • Problems with businesses making decisions that affected other businesses • Managements decisions impacting lower levels of the organization • If teams wanted to change their processes, process engineers needed to come in and change them

8. Case Presented • Process • Process in its infancy • New Process developed mapping out connections to all systems within the company • Businesses and teams given power to develop all of their own processes as long as they conformed to government regulations • These new processes give teams the ability to determine what is best for them as they are the ones performing their jobs. They are no longer dictated to run under a point A to point B structure. Employees choose their own point A to point B.

9. Quotes Quotes • “I can't design a process that works best for the employee or for the customer unless I'm actually there doing it.” • “And one of the things that we found is that innovation has to be done by those people that are actually using the process.”

10. Discussion and Conclusions • New process helps management see impacts across organization • Stakeholders in the system are given power to develop their own processes • Helps save time/money • Management now can see how their decisions will affect stakeholders

11. References • Carr-Chellman, A. A. (2007). User Design. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers: New Jersey. • Carr-Chellman, A. A., Cuyar, C., & Breman, J. (1998). User-design: A case application in health care training. Educational Technology, Research and Development, 46(4), 97-114. • Ely, D. P. (1990). Conditions that facilitate the implementation of educational technology innovations. Journal of research on computing in education, 23(2). • Merriam, S.B., & Associates (2002). Qualitative Research in Practice: Examples for Discussion and Analysis. California: Jossey-Bass. • Rogers, Everett M. (1962). Diffusion of Innovations. The Free Press. New York.