By: Rabia Wajeeh
Technology, a term frequently used now-a-days which usually refers to a method or process that is made for facilitating people’s work or to benefit them in their particular circumstances. Speaking of technology, we see that the term Information Technology is being very popular in almost every aspect of our lives. From E-shopping to E-Banking, we perform so many transactions daily which involves computer systems interactions somehow. Even when we make a phone call, it’s log is maintained at the telephone department’s database using an information system.
Information Technology is shaping itself as a backbone for the growth and development of our country. Government of Pakistan has launched its IT policy to keep pace with technologically developed countries. And some of the companies in Pakistan have enhanced their services by deploying information systems in their departments and providing their best to satisfy their customers. One good example is of ‘Pakistan Post Company’. In the past, this company was considered to be the slowest and unreliable source of delivering one’s important documents and people used to send their documents using some private postal services which in their opinion was more reliable and fast. But now after the implementation of information systems technology, they are providing enquiry and reporting facilities relating to the movements of mail items, receptacles and dispatches and have enabled a web-based inquiry facility within time. In other words they have improved their overall operations and increased productivity. And they have joined the IT world to keep pace with the current market and their competitors.
Despite of all these benefits of Information Systems, there are still so many companies and organizations in Pakistan both in public and private sectors, that are still being operated manually. They are using the same old file-based system which makes processing very slow and inefficient at the operational level which also affects other levels of organization. At present, there are many reasons of not deploying Information systems even though they are beneficial. Reason of not deploying an information system is because some companies are running small businesses and they don’t have more budget to deploy such systems.
In case of such organizations that can afford technological developments, the most important and significant issue is Technology Acceptance. And resistance to this issue becomes complex when examined in the light of how technology has been used in the past, how it may be seen as a tool of oppression, and how these experiences affect employees' emotions and attitudes about the proposed new technology in the workplace. For instance, in the year 1997, around 7,600 employees from United Bank Limited were retrenched mandatory on account of overstaffing of the bank and in order to achieve its objective of "right sizing" which in other words was the deployment of new technology which forced them to cut down the size of staff.
Talking about employees’ resistance to the technology, we find that such people who used to work manually get bothered by only thinking that how will it be possible for them to work on new systems. Some of such employees usually have a fear of losing their jobs by the introduction of this new technology as i have discussed above. Some people even think that if computers get introduced in our company then there will always be a check and balance of everything they do and they won’t be able to hide anything fraudulent. Some employees belong to a category of people who have nothing good to say about anything. They always try to oppose anything new and are negative in nature. Therefore they oppose the deployment and usage of new technology even though it is beneficial for the company but in some cases not for them.
Therefore before the implementation of a new technology it must be kept in mind that the introduction of a new technology will have profound effects on the work lives of employees. New technology always affects the social organization of work, access to resources, formal and informal organizational structures, and companies’ control patterns. And to overcome such problems, there must be a firm strategy that ensures the employees that they will not lose their jobs. Secondly there should be an awareness about the technology to be introduced and training programs should be conducted that makes them enable to work with the new systems efficiently. The information technology should make employees feel comfortable and rather than fearing, they should feel confident by having the knowledge about new system.
