Companies can plan to take advantage of technology trends, but what if customers or stakeholders don't want to go with them?
The case I was thinking about in class today was a few years ago, a school district in California tried to automate the taking of class attendance, which consumes a couple of minutes of each class period. They planned to use student ID cards with embedded RFID chips and put sensors on classroom doors, so that each student's attendance would be registered automatically. However, a few community members raised an outcry over what they saw as 'Big Brother' being able to track where their kids were:
http://www.wired.com/politics/security/news/2005/02/66554
These same kids may now be carrying around cell phones with location capabilities that their parents don't object to. These parents might also carry a grocery reward cards that notifies them when they're near a product on sale in the supermarket. How can companies determine where the line is between what is acceptable, and isn't, to their customers? How can they measure whether that line has moved over time? Does the line move when the perceived benefits of a technology overshadow the concerns, or does it just move gradually over time as people become accustomed to technology? (Or is it simply that as consumers, they can choose whether or not to participate?)
Along the same lines, about a dozen years ago I heard a presentation by computer-human interaction specialists whose research had shown that people resisted wearable computing (computer-enabled eyewear or clothing) because they did not want to have a 'cyborg' image. It would be interesting to find out whether that has changed - or not.
This was a good read and relates to the cone of uncertainty that we discussed in class. What is up with this love-hate relationship between parents and schools? The parents quoted in the article failed to give one good reason why it was bad for their kids to be tracked inside school.
ReplyDeleteYou rightly mentioned that these same parents give their kids cell phones with location capabilities and don't worry about that but they don't trust schools enough with information about their kids. I think parents would be more receptive if they perceive benefits accruing to them through this system. For example, if a kid skips school without the parent's knowledge, the system could trigger some sort of an alert to the parent's cell phone. That way the parent keeps track of whether his or her child is attending school regularly. These sort of additional features can swing the parents' opinion in favor of such systems.