Introducing the Implementation Workshop to a Technology Supplier working with a customer

Abstract

Today many implementation projects fail to get satisfactory return of investment when diffusing IT systems. This problem when implementing can be expressed as the assimilation gap, which expresses the difference between IT systems that are acquired and those that are successfully deployed into an organization. One approach to cope with the assimilation gap is to use the implementation workshop. The implementation workshop is a one-day meeting containing six different stages. This study reports from a case study focused on an implementation project by a technology supplier, in which the conceivable consequences of introducing the implementation workshop into their practice were assessed. The study reveals three main consequences from using the workshop. Although future work is required to assess the actual success of this implementation project, we conclude that the use of the implementation workshop may help to decrease the assimilation gap for technology suppliers.