Understanding change
To analyze Atos’ innovative and aggressive approach of organizational development, the well-recognized Innovation Diffusion Theory (IDT) of Rogers (2003) is subsequently used. The IDT categorizes types of people and their attitude towards change on an organizational level (see Fig. 8).
People categorized as Innovators have a high interest in new ideas and are very venturesome. Early Adopters are usually more integrated into the local social system and characterized by a high degree of opinion leadership. In contrast, individuals belonging to the Early Majority are not opinion leaders, but interact a lot with peers. The Late Majority adopts an innovation, because this adoption is necessary to maintain their position within the organization or because of high peer pressure, which means that they only adopt if most of the system already has proven efficient. The last category of people to adopt an innovation is the Laggards which tend to be quite isolated from the social system and are past-oriented. Laggards are very suspicious of innovations, so they have to be completely sure, that the innovation will not fail before they adopt it (Rogers 2003). With this pattern, it is possible to understand change processes and how to adapt Change Management when necessary. In which category would you see yourself during introduction of Circuit and why? As a manager, on which type of user would you focus your Change Management efforts?
