| This study focuses on the decisionmaking of legislative bodies in the adoption and implementation of new technology. Policymaking bodies commonly approve the use of technical innovations by government agencies as solutions to public policy problems. This has been the focus of the literature on innovations, yet policymaking bodies must also deal with increases in their own workload where new technology is sometimes an appropriate response.;This study proposes a new model of the innovation process. The stages in this model are; adoption, the formal decision to use an innovation; acquisition, represented by the funding, purchase, or delivery of the technology; and implementation, the multi-stage behavior that produces the structures and processes necessary to achieve desired objectives. Adoption is facilitated by the existence of a performance gap. The magnitude of this gap is defined in terms of performance demands on the organization: legal imperatives, political pressures, and the technical complexity of the problem to be solved. Successful implementation of the innovation is dependent on the characteristics of the innovation and the adopting organization.;The model is used as the basis for examining the case of reapportionment in state legislatures. Data on the legal requirements, political environment, technical complexity, and use of computers in each state is analyzed using regression techniques.;The results of the analysis support the multi-staged model of adoption and implementation. The newly identified acquisition stage is clearly the "missing-link" between adoption and implementation that has confounded previous implementation studies. Failure to complete the technology transfer stage is generally due to the characteristics of the innovation and accounts for the majority of implementation failures. Legislatures in large states, with an organizational history of technology use, under one party control and not covered by the Voting Right Act, are most likely to adopt the use of new technology to support reapportionment. States acquiring computer hardware and software not previously proven in a production environment account for the majority of the implementation failures. |
