Employees’ vulnerability – The challenge when introducing new technologies in local authorities

While it is well-known that the implementation of new technologies requires ap-propriate technical capabilities, research has for a long time almost neglected the behavioural capabilities of organisation’s employees to adopt innovative technol-ogies. Employees have to trust new technologies and thus, to be willing to be-come vulnerable when they adopting it as they have to cope with something they are not familiar with. This paper highlights the challenge for local authorities to cope with employees’ unwillingness to become vulnerable when it comes to im-plementing new technologies in local authorities. Based on semi-structured inter-views that have been conducted under the umbrella of the European project SUITS, we were able to identify two indicators for the unwillingness of employ-ees to adopt new technologies - incongruence of values and attribution of nega-tive motives. Furthermore, we show best practise examples how to overcome the negative consequences of the unwillingness to become vulnerable and to be able to implement new technologies successfully in the long-run. Our practical impli-cations in the end are derived by the experiences when introducing new technolo-gies in the partner cities of the SUITS project.