Mindfully Experimenting with IT

In many companies the process of new Information Technology (IT) identification and assessment lacks the rigor associated with experimentation. We explore cases of 5 companies not using formal experiments to implement social media but who applied differing levels of mindfulness to their social media implementations. It was observed that companies with a more mindful implementation had wider boundaries of assessments, richer interpretations of the IT\u27s usefulness, multi-level foci concerning benefits and costs, persistence to continue exploration, and a greater use of fact-based decision-making. The cases illustrate that the extent of mindfulness influences not only how new technologies are introduced, but also that a mindful introduction process can reap benefits of experimentation, such as greater stakeholder satisfaction and organization-wide learning and understanding the technology\u27s potential. Implications for theory and practice are outlined