There is another downside: The use of the software could lead to less face-to-face interaction with colleagues, Hofferberth says. Even so, he believes that the increased efficiency, faster invoicing turnaround and sophisticated reporting features of the software are well worth the effort. And he notes that people who work in IT departments "tend to like more structure than do artists or public relations people" and are often happy with the greater structure it imposes.

Bonnie Nardi, research scientist at Agilent Laboratories, and an anthropologist who has studied how technology is used in the workplace, is not so sure. She is concerned that the resulting decrease in face-to-face interaction could take its toll on an organization. (For more on Nardi’s ideas, read "Software for the People" at www.cio.com/printlinks.)

"There’s some magic in interaction, and any software that cuts down on that will cut down on efficiency and creativity," Nardi says. Specifically, she notes that it could cut down on creative solutions that come out of brainstorming sessions, informal mentoring among employees and team building. And if people are assigned jobs and sign off that they’ve finished jobs primarily via webpages, as you do with some PSA software, "then that’s all that people will do," Nardi says. "They won’t interact, and they’ll be plugged in to a webpage all day.

"A lot of really amazing people in organizations in America do far more than they are paid for. When you take away the ’invisible incentives’ [of interacting with others], you won’t get the best out of people," she says.

At Intria-HP, the problem of employee resistance was exacerbated by the fact that the software itself was somewhat difficult to use. So when people did report their work via the software, they often put in the wrong work codes. Those codes are of vital importance because if improper codes are put in, there’s no way to track work properly or create usable reports. And people would sometimes book their time as nonbillable when it should have been billable, leading to "revenue leakage," in Fink-Jensen’s words.

Managers were also equally confused about how to use the software, and so they weren’t able to generate the workflow reports they needed.

Fink-Jensen attributes the problems to three causes: the difficulty of learning the software, not providing enough training and not having adequate understanding of the ways in which work flows through an organization before implementing the software. "We had done a fair amount of training," Fink-Jensen says, "but we found out that we had to go back and follow up because they didn’t get it the first time around."