Dear Facebook, please read this. Thank you and have a pleasant day.

By capturing more and more customers you can start to identify trends which help guide the decisions you make in terms of both company and product strategy. I believe that being guided by this hard evidence from the marketplace is far superior to educated guesses from the ivory tower. Release and sell early and often.

Ben Ruedlinger
http://wistia.com
Wistia, Making Video Productive

Our research and experience confirm that adoption only happens when you deliver superior technology in harmony with supporting organizational and behavioral change programs. Put another way, you can't have adoption if you've missed essential features, provided a poor quality product, and/or failed to address the organizational challenges posed by the enabling technology.

So while I wildly agree that adoption is essential to realize return on investment, I'm not willing to let our technologists and OD folks off the hook quite yet!

Thanks for the comments. Any specific techniques or strategies have you used in the past to accelerate user adoption? Have you seen anything that fell on its face?

Jason

As to tips and techniques for fostering adoption Peter Cohan's model for collecting user stories by listening to users in a structured and sustained way is an excellent place to start. See http://www.secondderivative.com/Four_Opportunities_to_Harvest_The_Value_of_Informal_Success_Stories.html

what We have realized is that educating the users works best

You may have good value proposition but if thats not communicated properly it wont work...best is to educate users on benefits, motivators etc...We learnt it early and are now working on implementing the same...not sure if the next set of changes will solve the problem...but the success mantra is to...involve users and keep evolving

Bringing the two fields (OD and IT) together is just the beginning to maximizing user adoption and ROI. To make it work we need to make many major changes to how we approach IT projects. For example, we need to shift our focus from on-time and on-budget software delivery to focus on obtaining our ROI goals after the system is live. We also need to change the way we structure and manage projects, revise how we define “change management” and the activities we perform as part of our change effort, adjust the people and skills we staff on projects, and improve our understanding of what factors impact user adoption and what we can do about it.

I recently presented a paper at a project management conference titled, “The Future of IT Project Management: Managing Projects to Ensure End-User Adoption and ROI” that details how OD techniques should be applied to enterprise IT software implementations in order to maximize ROI. If you would like a free copy, please email me at info@TriTuns.com or check out our website www.TriTuns.com to learn how we approach things.

Best regards,
Jason Whitehead

All other criteria are secondary to this crucial step - no feature can be tested, no functionality appreciated, no organisational fit measured, if the user cannot use the system in question.

Brian
http://www.konnects.com

You've got to be careful when you use broad meaning vage terms like "success" and "adoption". Maybe the survey document brings clarification on each one them. And if it does, please bare with me as I didn't read it.

We are talking about Enterprise Software here, not open systems anyone can access to the benefit of their own. Enterprise Software is only justifiable by a strong numeric rationale that proves favorable ROI. ROI for the business, not for IT. This means more _________ (sales, revenue, profit, customer retention etc).

Let's take an easy example: Lotus Notes. As being a groupware application it had 100% adoption on the enterprise. Or do you think people would deny using it and work without email and shared calendars? No way. So it was remarkably popular, but not necessarily successful for the business. It was expensive to buy/maintain, hard to use, harder to customize, ran on proprietary technology etc. MS Exchange, on the other hand, was less expensive, easier to implement and use. Adoption? Well, again, 100% of course, but now with a leaner less expensive operation and happier users that don't have to call support as often.

In short, by taking the assumptions of the article both groupware solutions were successful (100% adoption in the enterprise), when in fact ROI for the business in each case demonstrated to be very different.

My 6/7 of a cent

I think due to the fact that, until fairly recently, enterprise deals were mostly sold directly to senior level decision makers. Who never actually used the software themselves. When implemented, it was pushed down from above onto the masses - who need to enter there data and use the system, in order for the aforementioned senior level folks to make sense of their dashboards.

Maybe salesforce.com changed the model with their go-to-market strategy of gaining traction in a guerilla style before closing the enterprise deal?

In terms of specific techniques or strategies - my previous company had a classic enterprise product that was sold to the VP level, and was completely unusable. 98% of users hated it - unfortunately the 2% who liked it were senior mgmt. Still, implementation was always a battle royal.

So my co-founder (who had been in the trenches with me at my last company) and I knew we had to take a different approach with our enterprise product. In no particular order, a couple principles we try to live by to help ease enterprise adoption - they've served us well so far:

1. Product simplicity - KISS. All of the classic enterprise systems with poor adoption are real beasts. We tried to keep everything simple - the user experience, the architecture, the data, the value proposition, etc

2. Limit the actual # of end users - We catch a break because we are gathering a lot of data, but only a select few break down the data. So even in a large enterprise setting, we only have a few people to keep happy. Not everyone has to have their "hands" on the system.

So, user experience -> value = user adoption