Activity 2 - Martin

Identify a model of change to help explain change within an organisation you have experienced

I would like to use our Institutional Repository (IR) project in my working place as example to apply diffusion of innovation theory (Rogers, 1965) to see the behaviour within different kinds of people.

In around 2009, some of our staff see the need on creating a electronic database to store all our academic authors' scholary output and provide searching function for user through online access. They act as an 'Innovator' to bring out the reason why we need this, why it should be implement and maintain by our library, etc.

Some library staff agree and understand the necessary of working this project. They form a new team to implement this IR database. It is not easy on the starting stage because no one has related experience on that. They spent time to learn from other academic library which has Institutional Repository database, and cooperate with IT department for implementing their requirment. They are the 'Early adopter' in this project.

At first most of the professor do not want to contribute their publication to this online database. They afraid ther work will be stoken by others through web access. Our IR team staff paid a lot of work to make phone calls and email to them to try clarity their worries. They innovate by the 'Early adopter' and believe this project can finally be done if working hard. They are all good 'Early majority' in IR.

As mention before, many professors has worries on putting their hard work in this online database. After our IR staff working hard to explain to them one by one, many of them begin to believe it is worth to putting their works in IR and think it is one of the platrform which can help others to know them more. They act like the 'Late majority'.

This project is still need time to grow up and I believe the 'Laggard' will become lesser in the future.