August 26, 2008 (Network World) — A reader of a recent newsletter article disagreed with my comment about unified communications that read "perhaps the first step should be to adjust the culture to fit the technology - you're likely to be less successful if you try to use technology to change your corporate culture." His contention was that technology should not be used to try and change people or the way they work.

To some extent, I agree with him. Using technology to change corporate culture is going to be fraught with difficulty for CIOs, line-of-business managers and others who attempt to change people's attitudes and work habits by imposing some new technology on them. If the change is too radical, people will resist and so will be less productive, and the company's investment in the technology will be lost.

But what if the technology really is a good one that ultimately will make people more productive, reduce the cost of doing business, improve customer service or otherwise allow for some real benefit to the organization?

Given that unified communications – including real-time communications, Web conferencing, integrated mailboxes and the like is such a technology – does it make sense to impose it on users even if the prevailing corporate culture just doesn't want to use it? I believe that the answer is a qualified yes. Qualified in the sense that the technology should be rolled out to users, but in the right way. That means that CIOs, other IT staff and senior managers should quantify the corporate and person benefits to the extent they can do so, identify those qualitative benefits that they hope to achieve, and then communicate those benefits to users.

Depending on the organization, that might mean rolling the technology out more slowly than some in IT would prefer, conducting more training than they might like to provide, or doing more hand-holding than they feel is necessary. However, the ultimate goal is to reap benefits that otherwise would not be possible.

So my answer to this reader is that technology should be used to change corporate culture where it makes sense to do so, but with the appropriate (maybe lots) of preparation and hand-holding to make it so.

Michael Osterman is principal analyst of Osterman Research.