You might have a great enterprise collaboration tool in place, but if no one uses the tool, it’s a wasted investment. Too often, organizations select a collaboration platform without conducting much research. The decision-making process may boil down to the fact that someone thinks the technology is cool and they have the budget to support it.
For technology projects, user adoption is a key marker of success. It’s even more important with today’s highly interactive systems and consistent user engagement. Organizations will succeed by approaching the human element of an initiative with a strong information governance strategy. The key to creating long-term adoption and engagement with this strategy should include organizing your stakeholders into groups. These groups fit into two major categories: strategic and tactical partners.
STRATEGIC
Sponsors: A sponsor usually comes from the executive ranks, and has the responsibility of modeling and explaining your collaboration strategy. The sponsor answers questions and discusses the project’s benefits so that others across the organization don’t forget. Sponsors also reinforce the original technology decisions, reminding others how those decisions provide value for the organization and support its core mission.
The best sponsors also model the results they want to see in the organization. They integrate these new enterprise collaboration tools into everything they do, using them to reinforce the value that started the project rolling.
Steering Committee: After sponsors, a technology project also needs a broader collection of management and employee representatives that create a steering committee. This group acts as a bridge between the sponsors and tactical stakeholders to maintain the goals of the solution. Did I mention that this group is all from the business, with maybe a management level IT member who is not directly responsible for the success of the project?
TACTICAL PARTNERS
Solution Advocates: They might be called “power users,” community managers or advocates. Essentially, these are the people on the ground alongside the IT personnel that work together on the daily ins and outs of the enterprise collaboration adoption. Such partners feed information up to the steering committee and sponsor as to where they would like changes to be made.
A good advocate could be a manager, but it’s best to choose people in the business who have adopted the technology and understand its value. These people should be continually discussing the nuts and bolts of user adoption, soliciting feedback from others in the workplace, and looking for ways to change user behaviors with the new system.
Technical: While the business users must drive collaboration projects for them to experience long-term success, there will always be a reliance on the core technical teams to ensure that the solution is working properly. Collaboration solutions are complex and there are three distinct groups within the technical team that supports them. First, working hand-in-hand with the power users and possibly the steering committee is a “professional” solution advocate. This person connects different users together to discuss success and streamline efforts.
There are also solution administrators who maintain the overall settings of the solution, but are not necessarily the overall system or network administrators that have responsibility to make sure the technology infrastructure is working. And, of course, don’t forget that all systems are supported by the technology help desk. They need to be an integral part of launch and maintenance.
User adoption is a key marker of a successful technology implementation. When launching an enterprise collaboration project, an organization needs the cooperation of the three key stakeholder groups highlighted above. Engaging those stakeholders helps align collaboration solutions and strategy to your business needs.
The best way for people to understand the capabilities of enterprise collaboration systems is to see them in action being used on a customized, specific level, connecting the how-to aspects of the tools to the larger business. In the future, the main responsibility for these technology projects may fall to a professional collaboration expert, rather than someone from the IT organization. They would guide and connect different parts of the business, holding a conversation around value rather than the technical details of which buttons to push.
