Paper 2 - Issue 2

Volume 8 Issue 3 December 2005

The Adoption of new Application Development Tools by IT Professionals from the Viewpoint of Organisational Learning
Torsti Rantapuska, Faculty of Business Studies, Lahti Polytechnic, Finland

Productivity and innovativeness of information work is becoming an important issue among information workers. This paper explores the working and learning of IS professionals when adopting new application development tools. I study how the IS professionals work, communicate, think through problems, and learn by way of getting work done. I also analyse the changes that the adoption causes to the individual style of working. The research questions are formulated as follows: 1) what contributes to the effective use of IT tools? 2) How does the adoption of new tools affect the individual working methods? The research is based on interviews of fourteen young professionals who have recently started using a new application development tool. The interviews have been conducted in their working places. The focus is on learning at work. Special attention is paid to the initial motivation of the innovation, to knowledge acquisition, and to communication with their team members during the problem solving process. According to the findings, the IS professionals’ working style is personal and context-oriented. As learners they do not interact with their peers and do not use systematic working methods too much. The Internet and help systems are used as the basis of group interaction and source of knowledge more likely than colleagues and textbooks. The systematic orientation of working practice is limited to the context at hand. At the end of the study, the results are discussed and recommendations are proposed to improve the software process.

Keywords: software process innovations, organisational learning, adoption, individual learning styles

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