User adoption strategies for Sharepoint - part 2 #intra12

Part 2 of my notes from the workshop about User Adoption strategies for Sharepoint by Michael Sampson. (Part 1 can be found here.)

We're at stage 3: Enlivening Applicability. Ways to do this:
  1. Over the shoulder watching: show how people use the tool in practice and learn from them
  2. Group re-imagining: help a group see beyond current work practices
  3. Embedded champions: one participant mentioned she connected to secretaries to speed up and encourage technology adoption. (I agree!)
  4. Sandbox for experimentation: don't go live right away, but start small, let people play with the technology and use the technology for the roll out itself.
  5. Easy first steps: closing down the options, focus on some affordances of the technology not all.
  6. Built it and they will come: set up the tech and see if users will adopt it by themselves
Next phase (4): Making it real. How do you make it real?
  1. Provide zero other options. E.g. take away all other platforms but one. Experience from the participants is this works very well.
  2. Offer start doing, stop doing patterns
  3. Bulk loading party. Use when lots of content has to be migrated, for instance. This strategy is hardly used.
  4. Internal User groups
OK, but how do we measure user adoption? Drucker says: You cannot manage what you cannot measure. Sampson shows how a company built a business case for a collaboration platform, focusing on hard numbers (savings, productivity, etc.). Focus on the affordances on the tool, process and organization level.

What to do if nothing works? Change jobs or go back to the user adoption phases and find out what you're doing wrong.

And that rounds up the pre-conference workshop!

Popular posts

Keep the Intranet Small

Image
This tweet by Jonathan Phillips ( @digitaljonathan ) triggered to finalize this post, that's been burning in my draft box. I've always been intrigued by how unsuccessful many intranets are. And there are all kinds of good reasons for intranet failure. One of the things that is hardly ever mentioned is: Shouldn't the intranet be smaller? Usually intranets are huge. Lots and lots of pages with lots and lots of content. With complex navigation. The intranet  evaluation surveys almost always show employees only use the news page and people finder. But still we build and maintain nice big intranets. Not only stats point to smaller intranets. There are others reasons as well. I came up with a few. If you have more, just leave a comment. Here's my list: -            user requirements: users don't require large intranet -            search/navigation: searching and navigating a small ...
Read more

Enterprise 2.0 Research

Image
There's not too much fundamental research on Enterprise 2.0. Deloitte recently published interesting research done on enterprise 2.0 implementations and their return-on-investment. In the EU research has also done as well. Study is being done for the European Commission and it was carried out by Tech4i2, IDC and Headshift. What was the goal of the study? Goals of the study To provide a clear definition of Enterprise 2.0 is, describe the market and the positioning of EU industry, also in comparison with US and Asia; To analyze the take-up of Enterprise 2.0, the organizational requirements, and the role on the transition to a knowledge based low-carbon economy; To collect evidence on its macro-economic impact, as a market opportunity for the European Software industry and as a productivity tool for European business; To identify and analyse both the direct and contextual challenges, including the need for Next Generation Access and the legal barriers; To analyse an...
Read more

Innovation in Turbulent Times

Image
I love reading articles about innovation. And every now and then you read one that is very interesting. "Innovation in Turbulent Times" by Rigby, Gruver, Allen (in HBR, June 2009) is one of them. This article takes fashion companies as an example for continuous, year-by-year innovation. And how successful fashion companies are usually led by two people: a left-brainer and a right-brainer. "If you don't have highly creative people in positions of real authority, you won't get innovation. Most companies in other industries ignore this lesson." They extend this to show that successful non-fashion companies have the same kind of leadership. And this kind of leadership is usually also characterized by a long-term relationship. I think this concept can also be extended to teams and projects as well. More often than not, people are good at one or the other: thinking up great concepts or ideas, or, making them. In teams and projects we can learn from this as...
Read more