Craig Roth
Managing Vice President: Communication, Collaboration, and Content
4 years at Gartner
25 years IT industry
Craig Roth is a vice president and service director for Gartner Research, in Burton Group's Collaboration and Content Strategies service. Mr. Roth covers a wide range of knowledge and Web-related topics at the intersection of collaboration, content… Read Full Bio
by Craig Roth | February 27, 2012 | 3 Comments
Many of the ease of use, form factor, and responsiveness promises made by mobile devices and software providers depends on an important underlying assumption: that you are consuming textual information way more than you are creating it. Sure, you may snap some photos, like/thumbs-up/+1 some stuff, and email or IM a sentence or two, but you’re waiting until you get to the office to really add new slides, write a 10 page document, create a slew of spreadsheet formulas, or enter new transaction records into your CRM/ERP system.
The “consumption assumption” may be fine for now. Even accessing enterprise information on mobile devices is still the exception for most information workers. But that world is expected to change, with more time being spent on mobile devices. So how will content creation needs be handled in 3, 5, or 10 years? I see a few options:
1. You’ll wait until you get back to the office to create non-trivial content (more than a few sentences, text that is formatted and polished, images laid out on a page)
2. You’ll muddle through data entry as allowed by the devices as a small price to pay for the convenience they offer. You can see that today at any conference where people are taking notes on iPad virtual keyboards, hands floating over the glass and eyes darting from presenter to screen on each word to see if it came out right due to the lack of tactile feedback.
3. You’ll hook up peripherals (keyboard, mouse, screen) to enhance data entry capabilities when needed.
OK, those first 3 are pretty much the status quo. What about some edge scenarios for how this could evolve?
4. Mobile devices will adapt to the need to create content by sacrificing some simplicity and slickness in order to provide richer content creation capabilities.
5. Non-trivial content will become endangered – if not extinct. Large-scale content creation won’t be needed anymore as people change expectations about receiving content. For example, people will get so used to terse, one line replies to their emails that they’ll stop expecting more context and the social cues that longer replies can provide. PowerPoint decks and multi-page Word docs will fade away since people won’t find enough time in front of full-sized interface setups to create them.
6. You’ll join a new information elite that doesn’t stoop to entering information. You can see this at work in the 2009 Productivity Future Vision video from Microsoft Office Labs. My blog entry satirizing this vision said that “Office workers will not create content anymore, such as typing long streams of text or slaving over the graphics in the beautiful interfaces they use. They simply do a few manipulations to content that already exists. Presumably a new underclass of information workers (I’ll call them ‘information morlocks’) slave away underground crafting detailed content that the surface dwellers can then use through simple, intuitive, tap-exhale-and-smile interfaces.”
Long term I think the content creation nut will have to be cracked by the mobile providers somehow. Whether it’s software or hardware innovations on the device, standardized peripherals available like kiosks, or something else I’m not sure. But I think creating textual content is still going to be of tremendous value and as more time is spent on mobile devices, something has to change so we can keep feeding the content beast from anywhere at any time.
Category: Content creation Information work Mobile Tags:
by Craig Roth | February 17, 2012 | Comments Off
With all due respect to William Ury and his negotiating strategy book “Getting to Yes,” the difficulty faced by owners of governance projects in organizations not used to governance is how to get to the point that saying “no” is feasible and actually works. After all, you don’t need to do anything with governance if you the answer to everything anyone wants to do is “yes.”
I talk to many intranet, portal, and SharePoint owners that are about to instantiate governance. About half the time they tell me this is the first attempt at governance in IT (at least around any type of knowledge infrastructure). Sure, the governance author can word it positively, being effusive about how this makes their life easier and saves them effort by eliminating decision time, dead-end choices, and makes them feel more free since they know their boundaries, etc. But my clients report consternation since it’s the first time people are going to be told not to do use a certain technology, not to change a site design, etc. How will they take it? Will they listen? What if they don’t? How will that reflect on me as the governance owner?
Before exploring what governance should consist of, I usually ask clients some questions that gauge whether anyone will listen to the governance. What’s the point in putting together a slew of committees, policies, and processes if no one will change their behavior anyways? That’s a “career limiting move.”
The power and authority to say “no” is not a given in organizations that don’t have a history of proscribing the activities of users in a given domain (knowledge infrastructure in this case). So here are some handy questions to think about before you try instantiating governance:
- Will users be aware of what they should not do? Given that users will not scan a 25 page governance document before starting any activity, how will they even know what they are not supposed to do?
- When do you propose to tell them “no”: before they do something they shouldn’t or after they’ve done it? Both have their own difficulties. The first option implies visibility, awareness, and possibly an approval process. The latter option implies audits.
- Why will people listen to you? Even if an executive has granted you some formal authority to create the governance, do the users take orders from that executive? Was the formal authority just a vague and general mandate? Have they been told independently (not from you) that they have to listen to you? Are their financial strings that will be pulled?
- Have there been previous attempts at telling users “no” and how did they fare? If they didn’t fare well, why will your fate be different?
- What will you do if you tell users “no” (such as telling them to post newsletters on the portal instead of emailing them around, or to use a standard design template) and they don’t listen to you?
Best of luck on your governance initiative. Here’s hoping that you not only write a sterling statement of governance, but that people actually listen to you the next time they try to do something that should now be done differently!
Category: governance IT Governance Microsoft SharePoint Portals Tags:
by Craig Roth | February 14, 2012 | Comments Off
Today is Valentine’s Day. What better day to show some love to your knowledge infrastructure – the email, calendaring, intranet, portal, business intelligence, and content management systems that tirelessly serve your information needs all year?
The best part is that you don’t even have to trudge to the boutique chocolate shop, jewelry store, or florist. It just takes a few moments to show you care.
- Ease the burden on your email repository by doing some basic triage that eliminates redundant and old emails, particularly with large attachments.
- Conversation and attention mean a lot. Do an update to those blogs or wikis you set up on your project or topic of expertise but just haven’t gotten around to feeding in a while.
- Scan through some of the discussion forums or RSS feeds that you said you’d follow, but haven’t checked in 6 months.
- Give a treat to your document management system by getting some files of general interest off your hard drive and into a properly categorized and tagged area that everyone can get at them.
- Polish up your profile on the internal social network. The more people that keep these profiles up to date, the more useful it becomes for everyone.
And of course, don’t forget the real people behind these systems. I know from experience – owning general-purpose, knowledge infrastructure systems is a thankless job. Unless those system owners are replacing a stone-age system that’s a true eyesore, they are unlikely to get much love from users. Keeping the email system running or returning the right search results isn’t exactly cause for celebration. Few users will note how much slimmer the document repositories look lately, or how much more smoothly the OLAP cubes are turning. So if some new capabilities have been rolled out that are making your life easier, drop the administrator an email and let them know. Real life anecdotes and value statements are as good as a gold tennis bracelet to the owners of these systems who often struggle to produce defensible return-on-investment (ROI) figures.
Just don’t send a valentine directly to your email system. It will probably flag it as spam and send it directly to the recycle bin.
Category: Fun Tags:
by Craig Roth | February 8, 2012 | 3 Comments
I’ve had a handful of clients ask me about the same use case: we need something to maintain a high level view of how a whole slew of projects are doing. There’s no standard project management software or approach being used, so this just has to be superimposed on the existing chaotic and inconsistent processes used by each project owner (I hesitate to say “project manager” as that implies more formality than there usually is in these cases).
They need something light, free (their budget doesn’t take a hit), and collaborative. We’re talking simple streamlining and improvement here, not a wholesale process change. Basically, someone with a higher level interest in all the activities wants a place to go to see how everything is progressing. And if something goes off the rails, they’d like to be proactively notified.
This sounds like one of those use cases that’s ripe for IT-assisted end user computing. It’s simpler than case-specific software, but needs a little help from IT to make generalized end-user software work.
The typical approach is to do this via email or maybe a spreadsheet. There are whole categories of software for project management and Project and Portfolio Management software, but those are much larger in cost and learning curve than the non-PMO folks asking me are looking for. But the clients I talk to have outgrown the email or document approach and want something a little better.
There are several options as I see it:
- Collaborative list: Custom lists (like those in SharePoint) are a straightfoward approach to allow the project owners to update their own list items with status, % complete, tag them with categories. You can attach documents if needed. And they usually provide for auto-notification through RSS or email when rows change.
- Collaborative spreadsheet: There are several cloud-based spreadsheets (e.g., Google Apps, Zoho, Smartsheet even has Gantt charts) that allow for collaborative editing without having to email an actual file around or worry about changes being overwritten. An enterprise-level one (security, de-provisioning if users leave the company, backup, etc.) is strongly preferable to just using free consumer services of course. The ability to enter long-form descriptions and attach file is more limited, but spreadsheets require no training.
- Wiki: The idea here is to create a kind of “living status report”. Type up the status report once as if you were creating a Word document summarizing how all the projects or tasks are going. But do it in a wiki and open it up for editing so it can now be kept continually up to date instead of having to create new versions each week/month with the date appended to the filename.
- Blog: If more of a newsletter approach than a status report is appealing, blogs can be used by all the project owners to post entries when milestones are hit and tag them with the different projects, organizational units, team members, topics, skills, or whatever you like. The entries are articles, like in a newspaper, talking about what has happened on the project and offering a sense of completion and praise for a job well done. RSS readers allow interested parties to subscribe to the blog as a whole, or specific tags within it based on their interests.
- Social networking: If an internal social network is being used, such as IBM Connections, project managers can just post updates when milestones are hit and tag them for future concatenation into status reports.
There are probably more as well as more creative options become available. These options generally forfeit the regular filing of a status report form that can be mined in case something goes wrong. But how often do you really go through the old status reports? These options usually have logging of changes that can help somewhat for auditing purposes, but would be difficult to use in a large environment. What you gain instead is a single version of truth and collaborative entry that avoids any concatenation or summarizing effort.
Are there any other ideas you’ve used?
Category: Collaboration Strategic Planning Tags:
by Craig Roth | February 7, 2012 | 3 Comments
Have you gotten any emails with this Email charter attached that points to “10 Rules to Reverse the Email Spiral”?
I’ve seen a few examples, but the “email charter” is one of the better and more organized attempts I’ve seen. Unfortunately, these email etiquette screeds suffer from the problem that they focus on email.
I’m convinced that you can’t solve email overload by just addressing email. Email is just one part of the overall information workplace that consists of many communication and collaboration mechanisms (technical and non-technical). If doing certain things in email is a no-no, then where should you do them. Here are examples from the email charter and my response:
- “Quash Open-Ended Questions”: Fine, then what is the appropriate time, method, process to ask open ended questions?
- “Give these Gifts: EOM NNTR”: Maybe there’s a better technology for sending short messages? There’s several, including one actually named “short message service”!
- “Slash Surplus cc’s”: Agreed, but what do I do when I want to let lots of people know I’m fully open to informing them and acknowledge that any one of them may be very interested in what’s going on?
- “Tighten the Thread”: OK, this one is on the right path. It mentions the etiquette breach(“it’s rare that a thread should extend to more than 3 emails”) and then suggests an alternative (channel switching to a phone call instead).
This advice usually lacks an understanding of the need even if you don’t like the medium with which it was addressed. Yes, sometimes people want others involved in determining the point or action items rather than encapsulating it up top in the first sentence. Sometimes people need to communicate very short messages. Sometimes they want to have unstructured, open ended discussions. Sometimes they want to let a large group of people know they are included and can be informed if desired. Sometimes they want to quickly deliver a multi-megabyte presentation to a group of people Just telling peers that these make for annoying emails and to “stop it” is not productive.
Face it: these different conversational needs exist and if email isn’t the right way to do them, then the right answer isn’t to lengthen, shorten, reword, and re-address the message to shoehorn it into your ideal email. The right answer is to treat the message need as valid and describe what other channel should be used instead.
If you’re trying to give advice to information workers, rather than an email etiquette primer, spend that time instead advising them to log into their IM tool every morning and keep the presence status up to date, making use of discussion forums for long conversations, using wikis and document libraries instead of attachments, using blogging or social networking to keep people informed without long cc lists.
Moreover, recognize that every organization has a different mix of culture, behavior patterns, information needs, and technology. I’d rather see advice that helps organizations craft their own responses to their information environment (like my attention management conceptual architecture) rather than a stock set of rules that can’t possibly take an organization’s expectations, needs, and capabilities into account.
Category: Attention Management Information work Tags:
by Craig Roth | February 6, 2012 | Comments Off
Many clients are asking about how to develop mobile custom applications, create mobile front-ends to existing applications, secure their mobile content, select mobile devices, craft mobile policies, and manage the devices. Those are all very good questions to ask and critical to supporting the needs of flexible, distributed organizations and workers.
But what about mobile access to general-purpose knowledge infrastructure and end-user development of collaborative apps? Once you get past all the security issues, how will the end users actually be able to access content and collaborate on their devices? Solid mobile device management, development, and information protection does not mean you have achieved collaboration endpoint independence. There’s still a gap for general purpose and end-user developed collaborative applications.
Increasingly, the most valuable work in organizations cannot be automated with process-centric applications (such as ERP and CRPM) or custom transactional applications. The work is de-routinized: ad hoc, tacit, non-repeatable. Your job is to figure out what your job is to meet ever-morphing organizational goals. For de-routinized work, general purpose knowledge infrastructure and end-user developed collaborative apps are essential. These include flexible tools such as collaborative spreadsheets, e-mail, social networking, wikis, blogs, and quick methods for business users to develop simple collaborative apps (lists, forms, libraries, newsletters) that don’t require IT involvement.
Gartner’s Tom Austin wrote in “Watchlist: Continuing Changes in the Nature of Work, 2010-2020” that work will be de-routinized since “The core value that people add is not in the processes that we can automate. The core value lies in non-routine processes, uniquely human, analytical or interactive contributions that result in words like "discovery, innovation, teaming, leading, selling and learning." Indeed, a Gartner Strategic Planning Assumption is that by 2015, 40% or more of enterprise work will be "non-routine," up from 25% in 2010. This concurs with a McKinsey study that showed the importance and growth of tacit work.
So if mobile workers in de-routinized roles are to be productive, they will require their mobile workplaces to support these technical needs. Accordingly, those in charge of assembling their mobile ecosystems and designing mobile workplaces (and hopefully there is a real person doing that!) must also evaluate how users will create and access general purpose knowledge infrastructure.
- Will the end-user developed collaborative apps created on the intranet be accessible from their devices or will they remain a bottleneck?
- Can the pace of forming, querying, informing communities be maintained while moving in and out of formal offices, or will social networking ebb and flow based on travel schedules?
- Will mobile workers have equal opportunity to contribute to collaborative work products, or will deliverables unevenly favor the views of office-bound peers?
- Will general-purpose enterprise communication tools work on the range of devices commonly used by employees, or will they be forced to choose between the general-purpose apps they need and the devices they want? And who will win?
- Will a mobile workplace be designed that integrates general-purpose knowledge infrastructure in a contextual manner that limits views to just what is needed, or will complex desktop-based navigation and window switching be forced onto tiny screens?
- Do the existing set of knowledge infrastructure support the mobile form factors and devices that will be used? If not, do the existing products need to be tweaked, front-ended, enhanced with 3rd party add-ins, or supplemented by mobile alternatives?
- Will creation of work artifacts (such as starting new documents, new spreadsheets, new discussion forums) be endpoint independent, or are mobile devices relegated to viewing and tweaking artifacts created back at the office?
These are just a few of the questions that will be left over after the custom mobile development, mobile content security, and mobile device management issues are dealt with. Better to prepare now then to get to the mobile finish line and realize it’s just the start of another race.
Category: Collaboration Information work Mobile Tags:
by Craig Roth | February 3, 2012 | 3 Comments
Well, this whole virtual collaboration thing, working from anywhere at anytime, was a nice try but now I guess it’s over. So says Lucy Kellaway in the Economist’s “Year in 2012” issue (Back to Formality). I’d best transition my industry analysis coverage area (collaboration, communication) to dry cleaning of wool suits, corporate real estate trends, and maybe start a magic quadrant on landline desk phones.
I’d like to know what others think of this prediction, but, appropriately, there seems to be no way to comment on this article. Presumably this is because you should be commenting on it around the water cooler, not with the dinosaurs still working at Starbucks.
First, here’s what Ms. Kellaway predicts for this year:
In 2012 the following will be back in fashion: the landline, the jacket, the commute, the handshake and above all the office itself. Out of fashion will be the virtual office in which employees sit hunched over laptops in their local Starbucks, joined to their colleagues by webcam and e-mail. Instead, working life will start to resemble its old self before the internet was invented. Employees will turn up to work at predictable hours five days a week, and will comport themselves with greater formality than before. Face-to-face meetings will be preferred to video conferences; ideas will be exchanged not by tweet, but by the coffee machine.
And as for the power of social software to help connect new workers to others that know the tricks of the trade or where information is, forget it. You’re stuck with whoever is physically within 100 yards of you:
Managers will start to realise that remote working has been disastrous for spreading corporate culture, and that in particular it has made it difficult for younger workers to pick up the tricks of the trade. With no one to copy, they have failed to adjust well to the world of work. The new formality will suit the young: they will turn up to work smartly dressed and have no option but to immerse themselves in the corporate culture and learn from those above them in the pecking order.
OK, I’ll admit my bias upfront. My team and I cover all the technologies Ms. Kellaway derides (web conferencing, e-mail, microblogging, social networking) as well as the new ways of working they enable. It’s actually refreshing to see someone arguing for the status quo. Her bio says she “pokes fun at management fads and jargon.” But I strongly doubt we’ll look back on the first decade of the 21st century and say “remember that fad where workers thought they could collaborate virtually and everyone was sending emails?” I have worked virtually for 14 years now at three different companies and while there are disadvantages, the advantages have won out. I voluntarily go into the office about once a week for various reasons, which seems to fit my ideal blend of old style and the virtual style of working.
One has to remember the drivers that made these technologies essential to the corporate tool belt. To say they are fads means also believing these drivers were fads:
- Globalization: The odds of everyone you need to be successful being present in the same office are increasingly remote. And I’ll also lump flexibility and outsourcing in the supply chain into this category as well. Good luck getting everyone you need in the same place, five days a week, from 9-5.
- Increased organizational agility: The need to respond quickly to events. While the status quo allowed quick creation of physical war rooms, it’s far more common to need to gather intelligence, ideas, and buy-in from a distributed virtual workgroup at all hours of the day.
- Broader talent pooling: I hire research analysts and I am quite happy to be able to draw from a nationwide (or worldwide) talent pool since we work virtually rather than the best analyst I can find within 30 miles of my location (no offense to one of my analysts who, coincidentally, does live within 30 miles of me!). For generalized jobs it may not matter, but a corollary to this driver is increased job specialization.
- Work/life flexibility: The jury is out on whether anytime/anywhere mobile access helps the worklife balance or hinders it. But there is no doubt this technology has introduced flexibility that wasn’t possible back when I had to babysit 2am production releases in the office (loneliness is having to wave your arms around every 10 minutes so the lights don’t turn off on you).
As for culture, I’m not sure the degree to which 1970’s office culture or social-technology-enabled Gen Y culture will win out, but it will be some blend of the two. There are certain people who make a good impression when leading, arguing, persuading, or connecting in person, and there are others who are more persuasive using virtual technologies. It’s nice to give the virtually persuasive folks a louder voice and I think the diversity of views and approaches is paying off.
If there’s a sudden resurgence of office workers voluntarily dressing in suits and ignoring virtual teammates then I’d predict that to be a short term fad, not the other way around.
Category: Information work Tags:
by Craig Roth | February 1, 2012 | 2 Comments
The amount of unstructured content being produced is increasing at an exponential rate and is increasingly spread across repositories, uncategorized, and untagged. Is your first thought:
- A. Oh my gosh! How can these information assets be protected?
- B. Oh my gosh! How am I going to be able to find anything or notice anything important?
- C. Oh my gosh! How can I make money by creating technology products to ride this wave?
- D. Oh my gosh! How can I make sure my target consumers notice my product messaging in all this noise?
- E. Big deal. This has been happening since Gutenberg and we have always adapted.
- F. That’s why I don’t use computers.
From your response, I think I can tell who you are:
- A. You are an information security, legal, identity, or privacy practitioner
- B. You are an overburdened information worker, the IT owner of information systems, or a researcher in human computing interfaces (HCI), augmented cognition (AugCog), or user interface/experience design (UI or UX)
- C. You are a software vendor (or pharmaceutical researcher for 5-Hour Energy!)
- D. You are in marketing, probably trying to increase sales for a discretionary product
- E. You are a pundit
- F. You are a Luddite
Seriously though, I’m amazed at the number of narratives that launch in different directions from this common “information everywhere” starting point. And each role has difficulty seeing the other angles. Take me for example – through my research and writing on enterprise attention management, I live in bubble B (how to find and notice important stuff). Most people I read and interact with on this subject are also in bubble B, so it becomes easy to forget there are so many people that are equally focused on their angle.
As another example, when I met with a bunch of “context aware computing” analysts, they were almost entirely focused on helping service providers utilize context (starting with location based services) to hit consumers with the right message at the right time to increase their sales (choice D).
Information proliferation will continue so it’s important to recognize all of the response vectors, ranging from opportunity to threat. Preparation is the best defense.
Category: Attention Management Information work Tags:
by Craig Roth | January 30, 2012 | Comments Off
Many information workers have Office intertwined in their daily work lives and many will get new versions from their IT departments automatically at some point without personally having to pay for it, so a new version of Office can feel like waiting to see what goodies Santa brought you this year.
Well, the wait will soon be over. Microsoft just announced the Office 15 technical preview, so some workers will be able to see the new features in the Summer.
Before we actually find out what is in Office 15, I’d like to say what I think should be in Office 15. I don’t mean piddly features here and there (why doesn’t paste as unformatted text have a hotkey out of the box?), but a major rethinking of what the office suite is.
I’m currently working on an update to my 2008 document “Content Authoring in the Enterprise 2.0 Age.” This document argues that commonly used content creation tools such as word processors and spreadsheets are being challenged by Enterprise 2.0 trends: collaborative authoring, content reuse, living documents, freshness preference, and content landmines. Organizations that respond to these next-generation content creation trends will be better positioned to create and disseminate the information that forms the core of their businesses. I go on to show how “core authoring needs” (the “document” as container, solo authoring, copy/paste reuse, collaboration via e-mail or tracked changes) are being expanded those 5 Enterprise 2.0 authoring trends.
Armchair pundits like to speculate whether Microsoft will ever lose its incredible dominance in Office suites. My answer was given in a series of content creation seminars I did a a few years ago:
If Microsoft is ever dethroned in the content creation market, it will not be because they were beat on features or marketing … it will be because of a fundamental shift in the content creation market for which they failed to adapt.
In other words, it is not Vendor X that will beat them by being cheaper or more feature rich. It’s Suite X that will beat them with a different set of technologies that addresses a unique but growing subset of content creators. There is a fundamental shift in how content is being created. It has bubbled up from old concepts such as collaborative editing and been picked up by web 2.0 and its Gen Y adherents who think in rapidly produced, hyperlinked, searchable content chunks instead of ponderous, static, e-mailed documents.
To do that would require a fundamental reworking of the Office suite, probably splitting off a new product suite to better capture this small, new, growing target market. By carving out space for a new product, they build incremental revenue, plant seeds for a new small but rapidly growing franchise, and better compete with innovative vendors unencumbered by entrenched bureaucracy and sunk costs. As a bonus, this would help mitigate the bloat and complexity of Office by separating out features that will be unused or confusing for many core Office users.
But this is what I recommended for Office 14 (see my 2009 posting What Microsoft Office 14 Needs: A New, Separate SKU) and it didn’t happen then either. It’s risky. They would be playing with a very large revenue stream to compete against a set of needs/vendors that aren’t really a threat right now.
I feel these needs are percolating beneath the surface and if and when they ever catch fire, they will do so more quickly than Microsoft’s 3-4 yr product cycle can defend against. I think it would be wise at some point to start a new franchise that addresses a new market and a new way of authoring, without abandoning the existing suite of course. In the meantime, content authors (which is everyone) should familiarize themselves with all the alternative forms of content that now exist beyond word processing doc, spreadsheet, presentation, and email.
Category: Microsoft Office Tags:
by Craig Roth | January 26, 2012 | 1 Comment
In my posting How a Collaboration Technology Gets Adopted I described a storyline of how a collaboration technology goes from purchasing through adoption (and beyond to value). That technology could be social networking, SharePoint, an intranet, or a portal – I’ve seen the same pattern with all of them. There are 3 paths for what could happen: “adoption”, “spotty adoption”, and “non-adoption” (see red highlight in pic below). If the technology is getting used everywhere, great! If it’s a failure, ditch it. But it’s that middle one – spotty adoption – that’s so difficult to deal with. Why is it tricky?
First, it’s easy to miss the fact that adoption is spotty. It takes some research to tell you that there are black holes on the org chart that rarely use it and then interviewing to find out why. Aggregate usage stats or packed monthly community meetings won’t tell you.
Second, the technology can look like a raging success since the areas where it’s happily used speak louder than those where it’s absent. Spotty adoption means you do have real fans, departments that have totally adopted it, and several real anecdotes where it has provided hard value. And the areas of the business, roles, or processes that haven’t adopted it aren’t complaining – they just silently go about their business without the technology. But anecdotal success doesn’t equal real success. Only by a more thorough canvassing of the business can the technology owner determine which parts of the organization could derive the most value from the technology and then compare where it’s being used against that list.
Third, it’s tough to know what to do if it is spotty. Is it worth the extra effort to do a more formal push like training, an awareness campaign, or door-to-door evangelism? Are there some enhancements required to pull in the additional audience and what will they cost? Quite often, the spotty usage and anecdotal success is just enough to justify staying on the current path. It is difficult to make the argument that mediocre success is not good enough and to double down on the investment. It’s easier to coast along and hope that the next, ballyhooed release of the software energizes those non-adopters for you. Don’t count on vendors to solve your adoption problems.
In summary, it’s great that you’ve rolled a collaboration technology out and it’s proven it can add value to some real fans. But, as I wrote in my posting on Getting to the Second Value Tier for SharePoint, getting to the second tier of value requires a different approach that puts the focus back on prioritization instead of just rolling it out and being happy with whoever shows up to use it.
Category: Collaboration Microsoft SharePoint Portals Tags:
