Friday November 12, 2004

JDS and Change Acceptance

As Jim Grisanzio has already pointed out, John Loiacano talks about Java Desktop System in a very interesting Linux World interview. He says " Sun's Linux desktop strategy is that we are in it for the long haul. I have been using JDS for a year now. I don't have a Windows environment. It is not perfect by any means. It is a solution, however, that is working in the enterprise environment. For people who are in call centers, rental car agencies, etc., it's an ideal environment. "

I talked in my blog yesterday about how Jonathan Schwartz addressed the very same point. It is nice to see the alignment :-)

I received a few comments from skeptics who doubted that using our own products would improve them. One of my strong points has always been that I can see both sides of every question. Of course that isn't always a strong point. It sometimes makes it hard to be tough when you need to be. Anyway, I do agree that using Java Desktop System internal to Sun in order to improve it may not be all that compelling a reason for us to use it internally. So I thought of a couple more reasons to use Java Desktop System at Sun. One is that using it saves us bundles of money. And the other is that it is part of Sun's strategy for success. I am not saying that we should do something just because the boss says so. And I am not slighting the importance of having a compelling business case. But change acceptance work is not about selling a solution to our employees. It is about engaging the employees to understand how we can be even more successful in going the direction we have decided to go.

The comments also got me thinking about what I believe is a very important function of change acceptance work. It is certainly something I observed as we did the change acceptance work for JDS Preview. Which, by the way has now been successfully rolled out world wide.

We often talk inside Sun about the equation: Quality (Q) times Acceptance (A) equals Effectiveness (E). The thing I saw in the JDS Preview roll out was that the Quality work and the Acceptance work create a feedback loop. First we communicated the vision and strategy. Then we engaged users to help us understand concerns and issues. Then we worked to fix those issues and improve the quality of the deployment which resulted in better Acceptance. So doing the Acceptance work resulted in improving the Quality of the product and the deployment. I believe on a much larger scale that is exactly what we will do with Java desktop System. We are in it for the long haul and we have only just begun.