Aim/Purpose
This study examines how employees evaluate mandatory digital change when technology use is imposed rather than voluntarily adopted.

Background
The paper conceptualizes mandatory digital change as a staged organizational informing process in which organizational signals shape expectations, post-implementation positive disconfirmation of expectations, attitudes toward the technology, and evaluation of the broader change.

Methodology
A time-lagged field study was conducted in a public-sector organization that migrated from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice through a staged hybrid transition. The migration concerned desktop applications for word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations; email and enterprise collaboration platforms were not replaced. Supervisor support and organizational support for innovation were measured before implementation; disconfirmation of expectations, attitudes, and change evaluation were measured after implementation. The final matched sample included 115 employees.

Contribution
The study contributes to informing science by distinguishing pre-implementation informing conditions, post-implementation expectation disconfirmation, and acceptance beyond compliance in a mandatory technology implementation.

Findings
Supervisor support positively predicted ease-of-use disconfirmation, whereas organizational support for innovation unexpectedly predicted ease-of-use disconfirmation negatively. Ease-of-use disconfirmation strongly predicted usefulness disconfirmation and was marginally associated with attitudes toward the software. Attitudes toward the software positively predicted the overall evaluation of the organizational change.

Recommendations for Practitioners
Organizations should design the informing architecture of mandatory digital change by calibrating expectations, involving supervisors, sustaining implementation support, and monitoring employee reactions after deployment.

Recommendations for Researchers
Future research should model expectations, perceived system performance, and disconfirmation of expectations separately, and should examine how proximal and distal informing conditions interact with implementation quality.

Impact on Society
The study highlights that public-sector digital transformation depends not only on technical deployment and cost reduction but also on how employees are informed, supported, and enabled to incorporate new systems into their daily work.

Future Research
Replication in larger samples, multiple organizations, and more complex technologies is needed. Future research should also distinguish implementation-specific support from general organizational support for innovation and compare immediate replacement, parallel use, and hybrid transition strategies.