Collaborative technology for the sea-based warfighter: a field study of GSS adoption and diffusion

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 GSSs 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 GSSs into the daily work efforts of several components of the staff of the US 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 the background to 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.