I thought yesterday’s on-line chat was excellent. JOEL OLESON touched on User Adoption and I love that the SharePoint Community is starting to recognize this crucial issue.
Behind closed doors I’ve had countless CIO’s and other leaders complain “not everyone is using SharePoint”, “our users hate SharePoint “, “they can’t find anything or the worst – SharePoint just sits there collecting dust”. Some users even use derogatory names like $h^tPoint.
This is a disturbing trend I’ve seen in the last few months. We’re visiting too many SharePoint customers where both IT and users recognize SharePoint’s value but it is either not being used at all or, being used poorly. For example, well intended workflows still have manual work arounds; or we encounter frustration among users frustrated with the amount of time it takes them to find documents.
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I completely agree Barry – user acceptance is neglected and often goes unnoticed. Thankfully, SharePoint 2013 is making things a bit more intuitive, but until using SharePoint is as intuitive as using DropBox, this may be continue to be challenge that doesn’t go away anytime soon. Simultaneously a lot of new competition is trying to get a piece of the enterprise action that Microsoft has successfully won the last decade with SharePoint.
Hi Barry,
As Jim mentioned, unfortunately it often happens that user acceptance is neglected and many times we’ve come across the same problem. The IT & Business is focusing too much on the technical and business aspects and dismiss the importance of delivering value to the end-user. User training or solution-integrated help manuals get insignificant budgets due to an apparent lack of business value. As a result, this mostly induces decreased productivity and may very well compromise user acceptance (at least for some of the features).
Hey Jim Kane, I fully agree that the business units are willing to invest intelligently and they are not being offered this kind of help. We are doing everything we can to advise, inform, and educate corporations to incorporate “User Adoption” strategies in their early planning and to communicate, communicate and communicate.
Thank you for your input! Barry
I’ve seen this as well. And the reason is partially Microsoft’s fault. They sell the idea that SharePoint is an out of box solution to all ills. We have seen SharePoint successfull when time is taken to: 1) Setup the proper governance and business enabling support structure; 2) Do not depend on “throwing templates over the wall” and 3) Enable business teams – build in the model, processes and support structure to listen to business teams, understand their problems, and configure SharePoint to suit their specific needs – with careful attention to communication, change management, and release support. This is not cheap, but success begets success — its gets easier and cheaper each time it is replicated. User adoption soars. User satisfaction soard.
Unfortunately, companies are not planning nor budgeting for these activities. IT has budget to “keep the lights on”. Business teams will pay for this kind of help, but they are not being offered this kind of help.
To me, this is the real gap/problem.
