Question: You are a team of managing partners of a large firm of accountants. You are responsible for auditing your firm's information systems to determine whether they are appropriate and up-todate. To your surprise, you find that although your organization does have an e-mail system in place and accountants are connected into a powerful local area network (LAN), most of the accountants (including partners) are not using this technology. You also find that the organizational hierarchy is still the preferred information system of the managing partners. Given this situation, you are concerned that your organization is not exploiting the opportunities offered by new information systems to obtain a competitive advantage. You have discussed this issue and are meeting to develop an action plan to get accountants to appreciate the need to learn, and to take advantage of, the potential of the new information technology.

1. What advantages can you tell accountants they will obtain when they use the new information technology?

2. What problems do you think you may encounter in convincing accountants to use the new information technology?

3. Discuss how you might make it easy for accountants to learn to use the new technology.