Monday January 10, 2005

Java Desktop System – Change Acceptance

In a posting before Christmas I mentioned that one of the lessons I have learned leading the JDS change acceptance (CAP) team is that change is a long term process, and we have only just begun. Back in November we updated all the Gnome desktops at Sun to a new look and feel that we called JDS preview because it looks like JDS. This was first step toward deploying JDS as a part of Solaris 10 later this year. There was a ton of work done to build acceptance for JDS preview. Our Change acceptance work included a flood of communications, personal contact with more than 1500 individual users, identifying issues and addressing them, and developing and sharing the vision and business case for JDS. At least partly because of the change acceptance work done by the JDS CAP team the new desktop was well received.

It would be very easy to declare victory but the fact of the matter is that even though we increased the number of people at Sun who are running Gnome on their SunRays by 25% we still have less than 60% of SunRay users running Gnome (JDS Preview). Later this month we will be making JDS Preview the default desktop which will certainly up the percentage but I'd really like to see more users convert voluntarily before we make the default switch. Even after the default switch users will still be able to choose to run CDE when they log in. Therefore we can't stop working on getting JDS accepted in our user base.

One approach that we have decided to take is to pick 3 major sites that have a low percentage of users running JDS and do a deep dive into what the root causes for low take up percentages are at those locations. Then we will be able to address the issues we identify and hopefully continue to raise the acceptance percentage. We are also continuing to work on increasing the number of laptop users running JDS. There is still a lot to do and it really does prove that real change takes time and we've only been working on this for 4 months.