Predicting Change: A Study of the Value Frequency Model for Change of Practice

Information systems (IS) researchers have made considerable progress on defining and formalizing structured methods to support collaborative development of information systems. Concepts and methods for transferring IS artifacts to practitioners in ways that give rise to sustained use nonetheless remain more an art than a science. A better understanding of the mechanisms that give rise to willingness or unwillingness to change could help IS developers predict whether intended users would be willing to embrace a new system if it were offered to them. Such understanding might also help IS researchers to develop more effective and reliable deployment concepts and methods for their solutions. This paper reports the findings of an action research study of change-of-work-practice among 17 groups at the headquarters of a 3,000-person organization. All of the groups considered changing to a new project-tracking-and-status system which supported a new collaborative project management approach. Five of the groups adopted the new system while 12 either did not adopt, or adopted but then abandoned, the new IS. The goal of this study was to explore whether the change-of-practice behaviors and choices that manifested in the field were consistent or inconsistent with the Value Frequency Model (VFM), a new causal theory for willingness-to-change that emerged from the Collaboration Engineering literature. Observed outcomes were consistent with the theory, which suggests that the constructs and relationships proposed by the VFM may provide useful insights to help explain and predict willingness to change to new information technologies and the work practices in which they are embedded.