User Adoption Insight Over Margaritas
This far into spring many Seattleites are more than ready for the first glimpses of that odd, warmish bright thing in the sky. When I lived back east we called it “the sun”. But sometimes, like this last Tuesday, we have to pretend and somehow manufacture our own sunshine.
Which is how a group of friends and I found ourselves at our neighborhood’s most brightly painted Mexican place. It was with near-salivating anticipation for our dry, near-perfect summers we ordered our pitcher of margaritas. Or…ok, maybe it had just been a long day for each of us.
Being the most technically-inclined person of the group – to the extent that I’m the only one with an iPod even – I try to be the one who kicks off our usual how-was-your-day round-robin with the briefest description of what I did, just to get my IT-related day behind us so we can talk about things that are common to the whole group. That day, I’d designed a Power Point presentation for an upcoming conference on user adoption in the cloud. When the conversation turned to the cloud my dear friend Jane, an office manager, recalled how just hours before her bosses sprung a new cloud-based Power Point-like software on her, telling her their whole organization was moving to it and she needed to learn it. Oh, and while she’s at it, convert all the other slide decks their office regularly uses too.
“It seems to me we’re always upgrading or switching to something totally new and the technology changes so fast, no one can keep up. It’s like technology’s moving so fast, we’re just running along behind doing our best to catch up, but we can’t. None of us can. It just moves that fast and changes that often. It’s not the technology’s fault. It’s just that as humans, we can’t change as fast as it does.”
Despite my best efforts, I couldn’t help but grin over my salted rim and say, “Precisely. And that’s where user adoption consulting comes in. We’re the ones you bring in to help you navigate through all those changes, with all those personalities and competing interests, and we set you up for the long-term. Because you know it’s going to change again. ”
Curt, a school counselor, looked at me and said, “So…it’s not the technology. It actually has nothing to do with the technology…it’s all about the people…and how they manage and get through the change, as individuals, as departments, as whole organizations.”
And it was like the sun came out right there at the table: the heretofore somewhat abstract notion of “user adoption” finally made sense to everyone at the table. Here was a real-life example they each could relate to; they’d heard it from someone going through it and heads nodded in recognition.
So while this last Tuesday afternoon didn’t set records for instant sunlight over Seattle, having my friends see a real-world example of what I do on a daily basis was definitely something to toast to.
Influence culture to drive user adoption
OBSERVATION
People often talk about corporate culture but they really don’t know how to sufficiently explain / define it, how to influence it, or how it can influence an IT project implementation. You may have tried to define what the culture of your client’s organization is today, but have you given thought to the readiness of your client’s organization to accept a new technology? You should, as this readiness is a key influencing aspect of your culture, and will influence the adoption of the technology you are implementing (User Adoption).Low adoption of the technology will keep the organization from getting the most value out of its investment. Without driving adoption, you might see:
- Limited usage of the new technology
- Users expressing frustration and difficulty with the new system
- Poor performance results at the individual and division level Let’s think about the technology implementation for your client. You may encounter resistance to the new technology.
- Leadership: Do leaders promote and support the new technology?
- Processes: Are there multiple or conflicting processes in the way?
- Training: Are staff properly trained, including and beyond technical training?
- Project overload: Are there simultaneous projects competing for end-users’ time and attention?
CONSIDER THIS
If your client’s technology is great but the level of readiness to apply the technology is low, you will not see much user adoption. In the below diagram, one can see a direct correlation between organizational readiness and end-user adoption. Your goal is to focus on increasing readiness by utilizing and acting on the assessment criteria stated above. This will put you on the way to creating a culture of increased readiness and improved user adoption, the goal for any technology implementation. 
THINGS TO THINK ABOUT
Have you thought about user readiness for new technology when trying to assess the culture of an organization?RELATED RESOURCES
Check out these other resources for more information related to this topic:- Take the Tri Tuns User Adoption Challenge - a free online assessment tool
- Read: “Accelerating User Adoption”
- Read: “Motivating User Adoption: Commitment, Compliance Or Wiifm?”
Resistance is a Judgment, Not an Action
OBSERVATION
When talking about user adoption of major IT systems – CRM, ERP, HRIS, etc – at some point the discussion always focuses on overcoming “user resistance”. When I probe deeper and ask clients to define exactly what they mean by “user resistance” (what form it takes, what causes it, and what they do to “overcome” it) they often struggle to provide specific answers. If we cannot accurately articulate the problem, how can we recognize and solve it?The term “user resistance” has become a vague concept - a convenient short-hand of sorts – that is used to justify poor user adoption. Implicit in this term are the ideas that 1.) user adoption is solely at the discretion of the end-user and 2.) if the end-user does not adopt your system it is an act of defiance. If you accept this to be true, it follows that the responsibility for overcoming user resistance lies completing at the feet of the end-user. This just isn’t true.
In a previous blog entry on leadership, I shared the quote, “We judge others by their actions, but we judge ourselves by our intentions.” When discussing user resistance it is very important to recognize that we observe discrete actions (user behaviors), but it is not until we assign our judgment that they become “user resistance”.
When we judge an action to be “user resistance” it has serious implications:
- It blames the user. By shifting responsibility for IT adoption from the implementation & management team to the end-user, we have created a convenient scapegoat if the system is deemed a failure.
- It helps us save face. By focusing all the attention on the users, we don’t need to examine where we might have done something wrong or lacked the skills to perform our jobs.
- It creates blind-spots. Our approach to change management might have been inappropriate, and as a result we might have ignored barriers to adoption that fall outside the users’ control. These organizational barriers could be what are preventing users from adopting the system.
- It ignores root-causes & contributing factors. Focusing on user behaviors may cause us to miss other technical, organizational, functional, process, data, or other factors that prevent user adoption.
CONSIDER THIS
Whenever the label “user resistance” is assigned, this is a signal that YOU have more work to do.- Stop and clarify what are the specific actions you observed.
- Identify what made you determine that these are instances of “resistance”.
- Determine if there are other explanations or contributing factors for these actions. Share your observations with the actual end-users and ask for their help in understanding what caused the behaviors, while requesting specific alternative behaviors they should take in the future.
- Look at other issues, contributing factors, and root-causes for undesirable behavior
- Find new solutions where before we might not have seen alternatives
- Take ownership and action for driving user adoption – without abdicating this responsibility to the end-users
- Help move things forward and drive success
THINGS TO THINK ABOUT
- What made you decide that the problem was “user resistance”? What specific actions/behaviors did you observe that led you to this conclusion?
- What causes the users to demonstrate this behavior? Was this an act of defiance? Were users not clear on what behavior was expected of them? Did you share your observations and suggest specific alternative actions they should take in the future?
- Are there other causes/drivers for the action (or inaction)? Are there organizational barriers that prevent users from acting as desired? Are there misaligned rewards or incentives that are encouraging the problem behavior?
- Is there something that YOU can do to change user behavior? Is there something YOU need to do differently to drive desired behavior? Is there something about your change or user adoption methodology that is encouraging the behavior that you labeled “resistance”?
RELATED RESOURCES
Check out these other resources for more information related to this topic:- Take the Tri Tuns User Adoption Challenge - a free online assessment tool
- Read: “Leadership: Are You Really Committed?”
- Read: “Does Your User Adoption Methodology Remove Barriers To Adoption?”
- Read: “Motivating User Adoption: Commitment, Compliance or WIIFM?”
- Read: “The Myth Of User Resistance”
Myth: "They Will Have No Choice - They Will Have to Use the System"
OBSERVATION
“People will have no choice – they will have to use the system”. Really? Whenever I hear someone say this I get worried – mostly because every time a client has uttered these words I found that their systems were in big trouble and not being used.
There tends to be an assumption amongst many IT and business leaders that if a system is core to their operations then people cannot perform their jobs without using it. This leads to the fallacy that employees will have no choice but to use the system and no further effort is required to drive and sustain user adoption. Upon closer inspection we see that even with “core” systems, people have tremendous choice when it comes to using a system.
For example, people choose:
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Timing. Do people use your system at the right time? Do they enter data right away or do the wait days or weeks before entering critical data?
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Accuracy. Do people search through the drop-down list to select the correct response or do they just quickly select anything in the list so they can move on quickly?
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Completeness. Do people put in all the relevant information in your free text fields or do they put in a single letter, word or sentence just because the system requires that they enter something?
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Compliance. Do people follow the defined process in the system or do they treat most activities as “exceptions” that require manual transactions outside your system?
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Pervasiveness. Do people use all of the system functions and capabilities or do they only use a limited subset of the available functionality? What value is lost because only a small portion of the system capabilities are fully utilized?
CONSIDER THIS
Claiming that people will “have not choice” is not only inaccurate; it is a very dangerous assumption to make. The reality is that people have tremendous choice about how, when and the degree to which they use your systems. The choices people make here are often the critical different between whether a system is considered a success or a failure.Organizations looking to ensure IT success need to recognize that users always have some choice when it comes to how they use technology – even with “core” systems. Once you recognize that no person, process or technology can ever mandate adoption by others, you need to shift your focus to developing and executing a user adoption strategy that drives effective user adoption over the life of the system.
THINGS TO THINK ABOUT
- Do you assume “people will have no choice” but to use your system? Did you assume this with your previous systems? Did you get full and effective user adoption with those systems? If not, why not?
- If you change your assumption to, “people have lots of choice about where, when and how they will use the system,” how does this shift the way you approach driving user adoption? Will this change the way you motivate, monitor, measure, and reward effective system use?
- What are all the areas (processes, functions, etc.) in your system where people have a choice about how and when they adopt your system? What is the impact if they do not use the system (for each area)? Who is impacted if it is not used? What is the impact?
Related Resources
Check out these other resources for more information related to this topic:- Take the Tri Tuns User Adoption Challenge - a free online assessment tool
- Read: “Accelerating User Adoption”
- Read: “Motivating User Adoption: Commitment, Compliance Or Wiifm?”
- Read: “Does Your User Adoption Methodology Remove Organizational Barriers?”
- Read: “The Myth Of User Resistance”
- Read: “What’s Wrong with WIIFM”
DOES YOUR USER ADOPTION METHODOLOGY REMOVE ORGANIZATIONAL BARRIERS?
OBSERVATION
Many IT implementations suffer from poor user adoption because they did not take into account the barriers to user adoption that lie outside the users’ control. There are many organizational elements that if not addressed prevent people from using the system even if they want to do so. Barriers to adoption may include things like lack of time for learning new processes or attending meetings, competing workload or other items given priority by management, misaligned rewards & recognition metrics that penalize people for adopting the system, inappropriate access rights within the system, undefined or poorly defined processes, or technical deficiencies within the system. Poor data quality may also reduce adoption since ‘garbage-in, garbage-out’ makes system generate reports meaningless for decision-making purposes.
If we want to maximize user adoption, we need to take a comprehensive approach to identifying and removing barriers to adoption. Unfortunately, most traditional Change Management programs are focused on the initial go-live and they primarily involve providing training and communications. Traditional change approaches often ignore the critical aspect of removing adoption barriers. We need to move beyond traditional change management methodologies to take a more expansive approach to evolving the organization and drive user adoption over the long-term.
When examining barriers to adoption keep in mind:
- Barriers to adoption may be different in each department or workgroup
- Some barriers may touch multiple departments in your organization and thus require a coordinated cross-departmental approach to resolve
- The users within each department are the people who can best identify the barriers the face, and thus you need to actively engage them in your process
- Perception is reality when it comes to adoption barriers. You may need to address user perceptions as well as tangible barriers
- New barriers may emerge over time, so you need to periodically review your organization to address any new barriers that may arise
CONSIDER THIS
Instead of employing a traditional Change Management methodology, use a more expansive User Adoption Methodology that identifies and removes barriers to adoption. Your user adoption program should begin long before go-live and continue well past the initial deployment in order to drive initial adoption and sustain it over the life of the system.
THINGS TO THINK ABOUT
- What barriers to adoption prevent people from using your system? Who has the authority and ability to remove these barriers?
- Does your change management approach adequately address existing and future barriers to adoption?
- How can you better engage your users to get their help in identifying and removing barriers to adoption?
- What are the unique barriers to adoption in each user department/workgroup?
- How will removing adoption barriers affect the level of benefits realization & ROI from your IT investment?