Sampson User Adoption Strategies

Shifting Second Wave People to New Collaboration Technology
1. Auflage 2010
ISBN: 978-0-473-16907-7
Verlag: The Michael Sampson Company
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 268 Seiten

New collaboration technology is frequently rejected by groups. The answer is to give more attention to user adoption. This book has the answer - strategies, case studies, explanations, and frameworks to help you develop your User Adoption Approach.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Sampson, Michael

Leseproben

Chapter 1
Focusing on User Adoption is Critical   Adoption can be hard ... particularly with broad-brushed tools that can do so much. {i} Scott Jamison, Jornata Permission granted by Scott on 20100426     The world is filled with groovy technology to support people working together. There’s no shortage of it. During the decade that I tracked all new product and service announcements in the “collaboration” space, hardly a day went by without at least one existing vendor releasing new features, if not a new entrant vendor making a splash on the global stage. The technology to support collaboration is no longer the limiting factor. User adoption is. In this chapter, you will: •       Consider the evidence on the importance of user adoption. •       Contemplate the cost and risk of not developing a user adoption approach for your organization. •       Define the term “user adoption strategies” and its derivatives, as used in this book. •       Learn the difference between first and second wave people. The “Why” of User Adoption Strategies The user adoption “problem” is a refrain I hear all over the world when I’m working with organizations on collaboration strategy—in Singapore, in Australia, in the United States, in Europe, and yes, even in my home country of New Zealand. But it’s not just what I’m hearing. There is growing agreement among multiple groups of people involved with collaboration technology—the vendors, the consultants, the internal evangelists, the end-user organizations—that an intentional focus on user adoption is essential. I’d go as far as saying that many are coming to the view this is the main game. The basic thinking goes like this: •       It is important to choose the right collaboration technology for your group, organization or community—not too much to confuse them, and not too little to annoy them. For this you need to know certain things (e.g. how the people within the target group work), you need to get various things right (e.g. vendor selection, risk mitigation, and technology integration), and you need to have the right people in place to make it work well (e.g. business-focused IT administrators). •       There will be a group of people in any organization who quickly and actively embrace the new collaboration technology. These are people we have traditionally called “early adopters,” but in this book are called “first wavers.” They are the people for whom getting to use the new technology is sufficient reward to experiment and try things out. They don’t need someone else to actively advocate how new technology will help them, will make their lives better, or will be better than the current technologies they are using today—they’re able to intuit it for themselves. •       The above group, the first wave of adopters, is fairly small within any group, organization or community. Getting beyond the first wave adopters to the second wave adopters is essential to driving better business performance. This is because second wave people are carrying out vital business activities, there are many more of them numerically within any group, organization or community, and as a consequence they have a much greater impact on business performance. •       Second wave people, however, are different from first wave people. They are less capable by themselves of making the intuitive leap from what the technology does to how they could use it to do their work better. They need help from other people and external influences. This book is about how to help second wave people, and how to lead them to more effective ways of working. We explore the nature of second wave people at the end of this chapter, and compare them with first wavers. User Adoption Problems in SharePoint Land I have done a lot of work with SharePoint during the past 4 years, resulting in two SharePoint-focused books. One of the problems I have frequently observed involves the “IT-department-led” implementation of SharePoint. This isn’t a problem with the technology of SharePoint as such, but rather a problem of how specific organizations approach the use and adoption of SharePoint. By the time IT professionals have SharePoint ready to go for everyone else, they have forgotten the pain and frustration they experienced when learning SharePoint. In addition, while SharePoint is “the job” for IT professionals, it’s definitely not the job for business end users. Business end users have a job to accomplish, and SharePoint is merely a means to an end. These factors create two problems for IT professionals when working with business users on SharePoint adoption: 1.       They think all business users know what they know— SharePoint has become second nature to them, and they can’t understand the “big deal” users are making about changing their work and embracing SharePoint. 2.       They don’t share a common motivation or language with the business users, and so talk at cross-purposes. Both sets of people may be speaking English (or French, or German, or Danish), but for all intents and purposes, there is no common ground on which a conversation can be held. Again, this isn’t a technology problem—it can happen regardless of the specific collaboration technology your organization embraces. It’s a problem of the approach taken by the organization (or a sub-part of it), and its effects are very damaging. Other people who work with organizations on SharePoint have commented on the same phenomena. For example: •       Lee Reed frequently presents on the user adoption challenge with SharePoint at conferences and events in the United States.{ii} Lee says, Oftentimes, SharePoint is rolled out with great fanfare and is lauded as a fantastic solution to a huge number of business challenges. “We're transforming our organization through collaboration,” the mass e-mail notification might say. Well, your users have heard that before, haven't they? Users have a hard time believing such pontifications, and their skepticism can quickly undermine any efforts to roll out SharePoint. •       Kim Lund from Mindsharp wrote a blog post in December 2009 entitled How to Increase SharePoint End User Adoption.{iii} Kim writes, If you find that user adoption of SharePoint is avoided or slower than anticipated in your working environment, you are not alone. Many students that I have trained, consulted [with], and listened to have expressed their pain points for SharePoint adoption. Permission granted from Kim on May 8, 2010. •       Clare Stone from Pentalogic Technology wrote a white paper on barriers to end user adoption on SharePoint in October 2009.{iv} Clare starts the white paper with this statement: It’s easy to deploy an application like SharePoint within an organization; the hard part is getting people to use it in a way which makes them more productive. Many people I talk with disagree that deploying SharePoint is “easy,” but fully agree that user adoption is THE “hard part.” Permission requested via LinkedIn on 20100507-1121. User Adoption Problems in Other Lands I wrote above that many people are coming to see that an intentional focus on user adoption is essential. For example: •       Socialtext (www.socialtext.com), an enterprise collaboration software and professional services company, released a white paper on user adoption in 2009.{v} In the opening section, the white paper states: The success or failure of any social software solution … [is] a direct result of its adoption rate …. There are plenty of examples of failed social software projects. Why did they fail? Because they were not embraced by users. •       NewsGator (www.newsgator.com), a software company focused on enterprise social computing extensions for SharePoint, also released a white paper on user adoption in 2009.{vi} In the opening remarks, NewsGator says: This paper presents a model for proactive analysis that should be undertaken prior to or during the early phases of deploying an enterprise social computing initiative. Investing the time and effort to complete the analysis should greatly increase...