If your new technology doesn’t work, you are probably the reason why, advises John Tate.

I have been giving a number of talks over the last couple of months at regional meetings of CIMA, my accounting institute. In my lectures I have been looking at the latest technologies, such as big data, the cloud and mobile devices.

The delegates have been accountants, mainly at medium-to- large companies with turnover upwards of £100m. It was very interesting to get feedback on their real-life experiences of leading-edge technologies in the corporate world.

Trying new technology

People were keen to talk about what had and hadn’t worked. Most of the technology that was being tried was new, so one might have expected a lot of the focus to be on whether the products themselves actually worked or not.

However, something really significant stood out from the sessions. The success or failure of implementing new technology was more down to the people and processes involved, rather than the technology itself.

One of the cloud products most commonly used by delegates was Dropbox, which allows you to store and share documents, images and files on the internet. It is expected to have 150 million users by the end of this year, and more than one billion files are added to the system each day.

A number of people had issues with the product, and I thought it would be interesting to examine some examples of these.

One delegate had had Dropbox installed on his company computer to help manage its events programme. Previously, email was used to send people all the relevant information, including the agenda, delegate listings, venue details and so on. It was difficult to make sure the right information got sent to the right people at the right time.

So the idea behind using Dropbox was that users could ‘pull’ the latest information when they needed it, rather than having it ‘pushed’ at them by email. It sounds a great idea in theory.

However, in practice, when Dropbox was installed for this particular user the notification facility was not set up. So the only way my delegate knew whether he had received a communication, or a new document had been loaded onto Dropbox, was to log into the system and check – meaning he had to log into Dropbox several times a day. He was continually worried that he might have missed something important.

Dropbox has the capability to notify a user when a new document is loaded or changed, so the problems were down to the technology not being set up correctly, and poor communication between the user and the IT department.

A second delegate said he found Dropbox very slow. It emerged that he, and other staff in his company, were using Dropbox to store and listen to personal music tracks at work.

This no doubt impacted on the ‘business’ use of Dropbox, and must have affected the general speed of the company’s internet connection. Had senior management known, no doubt the solution to the reponse-time problem would have been to immediately stop people using Dropbox to listen to music.

Lapse in procedures

A third delegate mentioned that his employer had introduced a BYOD (bring your own device) policy, under which staff could use personal IT equipment in the work environment.

As the employer used Dropbox, the IT department installed this onto his personal laptop.

Working in finance, he then had access to a large number of confidential files. This all worked fine until he left the company and changed jobs. Unfortunately, his previous employer didn’t delete Dropbox from his laptop and he continued to have access to his old files and more recent updates for several months after leaving.

It was an obvious lapse in procedures, but situations like this can all too easily be overlooked.

So there are some clear lessons to learn here. If you adopt new technology you are likely to change the way you work, so make sure you pay sufficient attention to the set-up and implementation of the procedures and processes for the new system.

New technology may sound very attractive but, in practice, it can take time for it to work properly.

John Tate is a business consultant, IT adviser to CFG and a visiting lecturer at Cass Business School