As you might know, I work in a district court. It probably won’t come as a surprise that many of my users are conservative about tech. So how did I go about teaching them how to use this advanced technology?
Altering the mindset
“Video conferencing is scary and difficult”. That was the vibe I sensed from my users when we first introduced it last fall. This is a bad starting point for teaching stuff. People who are scared of technology are way less likely to learn it well than people who are intrigued by it. What to do?
First I started with some good old marketing. The central court administration had already written a paper about the advantages of using videoconferencing in courts. I distributed this to every user in the court. This caused some judges to become excited about the possibilities, while some were still skeptical.
Demo time
This is one of the Tandberg VC units we use.
The next step was a demo. This was probably the single most important step of turning their mindset around. I structured the demo as following:
First I talked about the possibilities with this new technology. Cost savings, faster trials, shielding witnesses from people they don’t want to or shouldn’t meet, and so on.
Then I told them to think about the equipment as a phone with a display. Dial a number or select from the address list. This was an eye-opener for many. Suddenly the technology wasn’t as arcane anymore.
Thirdly I demonstrated a call. I did it slowly so everybody could follow along. Then I let judges who wanted to try for themselves repeat the call. When they exclaimed “wow, that was easy”, I was relieved.
When several people had tried to call, I proceeded to demo some more advanced features like PC presentations and camera movements.
Finally I promised that I would personally help everyone the first time they used the system during a trial, and in trials with lots of advanced uses.
The result
All this resulted in changing the mindset of many people from being scared of the technology to being intrigued by the possibilities. We have since become one of the district courts who uses this equipment most.
I’ve continued to support my users, and have written detailed guides for users who want to learn more. I’ve also shared our experiences with other courts.
I think the success of this technology introduction to three simple points:
- Compare the tech to simple tech the users use often
- demo the equipment and let the users try it voluntarily
- provide great support in the first phase and continue with support when needed.
If you follow these steps you can teach tech much more easily to non-techies and techies alike. Good luck.
Questions?
If you have any specific question about this product rollout, please feel free to contact me @thomassnielsen or use my contact form.
Finally I’ve got time to write an update. This year’s exams and Christmas preparations are over, and I’ve got some time to spare. Christmas is also a quiet time at work, which leads me to this post.
Having completed all the critical tasks and much more, I figured I could use some time to replace our inventory system. Currently we use an Access database on a PC running Windows 98 without any backup.
I figured I could do something about that quite easily. So in the past few days I’ve been programming a web-based inventory system tailored to our needs, but still expandable. I still got a couple of hours of PHP coding left before it’s done, but I feel confident that it will be up and running by tomorrow.
I plan to run the new system on a virtual machine running LAMP, and having redundant backup. Since php is not a required skill for this job, I will of course also make sure that I document it well, and make a guide on how to export an excel spreadsheet with phpmyadmin if needed.
I am still considering if I should open source it or not, we’ll have to see how it goes.
Marry Christmas (and/or other hollydays) and happy new year to you all.
