Improving Digital Adoption

I've been working with VisualSP a lot lately, now that my focus is on user adoption. One of my colleagues there recently collected a set of survey data about what organizations see as their biggest challenge. The clear winner was user adoption, and the next 4 were all topics related to that. I find this interesting, because it shows a growing awareness of the importance of user adoption.

If you oversee document management, compliance policies, and collaboration channels, you know the level of productivity that can be achieved using workflows.

In addition to the out-of-the-box workflows, SharePoint and Office 365 enable the creation of custom business workflows and a variety of no-code automation solutions.

Many companies build these computing processes to help employees easily and duly perform repetitive tasks. But, many of these solutions are often either ignored or abandoned.

There is a better approach to these initiatives.

During the keynote at #SPC18 last week, the MS team re-assured the attendees that SharePoint is seen as a 'foundational service' for Office 365, along with OneDrive and Exchange. Microsoft has seen a 200% growth in SharePoint storage used in O365. Out of all active SharePoint seats – 70% of them are for SharePoint Online (as opposed to on-prem). Their strategy has 4 pillars that are defining the dev work they are doing day in and day out. Here's a summary of those pillars and what features we're seeing happen for each of them.

Whew... what a busy couple of weeks. The SharePoint NA conference on May 21-23 was packed with interesting sessions and opportunities to connect. I'm just now getting past the obligatory catch-up cycle that follows one of these events, and I'm starting to look back through my notes. I thought I'd share a few highlights over the next few days to help me process the things I want to remember and perhaps help someone else who didn't get to go. Today, I'm looking back at the keynote from Bill Baer, Jeff Teper, Seth Patton, and a cast of 1,000's on day 1.

The MS team identified and highlighted six trends that are defining the digital workplace, and I thought some of them were helpful in analyzing our own personal and organizational goals from a big-picture / strategic perspective. For now, I'll let you read everyone else's posts about the numerous announcements made there, and I'll focus on the strategic trends the MS team presented, as well as my own thought processes that wandered off from there...

In this instance, "training" means "transferring knowledge to an end-user"; and, “helping" means "guiding an end-user through steps while completing a task".

Helping works better than training because mastery is attained at work, not in classrooms. In other words, learning on the job is the superior way.

Training is necessary in SharePoint and Office 365 adoption efforts. The impact of many other components such as governance, workflows, and support depends on the outcomes of a training strategy. But, not all training approaches are equally effective.

Holding classes, conducting webinars, broadcasting tips, and using contextual help systems are the most widely discussed training strategies.

An ideal training strategy is that which enables the organic growth of the platforms’ usage. It's a way of training that actually drives user adoption. To work well, it needs to have 4 applicable attributes.

We have made it easier than ever before to quickly access the VisualSP Support Site.

Sustainable SharePoint and Office 365 adoption is not easy to achieve. Most companies struggle to help employees use the platforms sufficiently enough to produce the desired business results.

When adoption stagnates or fails, productivity drops, frustration takes over, business processes fragment, and return on investment shrinks. Helping users to fully embrace the platforms is worth the effort.

Display policies to users right in their moment-of-need. Contextually deliver governance policy content directly to end users when they need it most.

We all want our applications to be used more. If you put your heart and sweat into building something and you don't see the usage levels that you had imagined would be there, it would definitely demotivate you. Happens all the time unfortunately.