Improving Digital Adoption

If your digital workplace is heavily based on teamwork, you can take full advantage of one of the most powerful services within the Office 365 suite: Office 365 Groups.

Now, here is a common scenario: you tell your team members to make use of a tool; they open the tool but don't know where to start. This happens even after everyone has gone through sessions of training.

Not knowing how to use a tool is one of the greatest barriers to better usage.

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...

Team collaboration, task automation, data security, employee productivity, and return on investment are the common business pursuits. Toward those goals, companies have deployed SharePoint and Office 365.

However, all these business goals are only attainable to the extent that employees actually use the platforms. At the same time, SharePoint and Office 365 adoption remains a major challenge to organizations of all sizes. The idea of "build it; they will come" seldom translates into reality.

This is the fourth post in my series about Caveman User Adoption. The first was an overview of 4 Caveman Tenets of user adoption that together create an environment where SharePoint and Office 365 will grow organically. This article is a deeper dive on the third tenet – Simple Solutions. The core idea here is to solve common pain points with something that is satisfyingly simple. Don't design the proverbial solar-powered rocket launcher with GPS and cup-holders when all the users really needed was a club. Clubs are easy to replicate. They cost little to maintain. They have a short learning curve. They are satisfying to use. When you've got a new club - everything looks like a nail.

This is the third post in my series about Caveman User Adoption. The first was an overview of 4 tenets that together create an environment where SharePoint and Office 365 can grow. This article is a deeper dive on the second of those tenets. Measuring adoption is an area where a lot of times we overthink things. We track the wrong things (like page hits and unique visitors for a site) and build solutions that are way more complicated than we needed in order to tell our adoption story.

This is the second post in my series about Caveman User Adoption. The first was an overview of 4 tenets that together create an environment where SharePoint and Office 365 can grow. This article is a deeper dive on the first tenet – Simple Governance Policies.

I’ve been doing some speaking lately on the topic of user adoption. It’s an important subject, not least of which because so many times we, as an industry, get it wrong. We either ignore it (build it and they will come) or treat it like a project (training classes will be complete by August 1). In my experience, neither of those things work. Success is not rocket science, though. There are many books and posts out there that discuss adoption from more conceptual perspectives related to vision, communications, and human behavioral changes. Those discussions are certainly valid, but I plan to tackle the topic from a more functional perspective and discuss strategies and activities as they apply to the team behind the platform.

The following is an excerpt from our whitepaper Micro-training In Context: The Path to Faster Technology Adoption. To read the full paper, click here.