Digital Landfill

[As is the case with our 5 myths series, the opinions expressed in the 8 things guest columns are those of the guest contributor and not necessarily mine or AIIM's.  This guest post was compiled from a number of different contributors by Jenna Dobkin from harmon.ie.  The contributors were all among the list of top 25 SharePoint influencers relative to Social Business that had been previously compiled by harmon.ie -- note #3 is a pretty cool dude.]

Two thirds of global companies with annual sales of $1 billion or more are failing to become social enterprises, according to CapGemini Consulting global study released earlier this month. And while businesses are feeling the stinging sense of urgency they must adopt a true social business model if they are to remain relevant, sustainable and profitable, most simply don’t know how to go about it.

 Inspired by studies showing low user adoption of enterprise platforms like Microsoft SharePoint, we solicited advice on promoting SharePoint adoption from some of the most experienced and influential experts around. Each of the following road-tested tips and suggestions were supplied by one of the “Top 25 Most Influential SharePoint Thought Leaders in Social Business Today.”

Recommendations are divided into four areas, where years of experience are especially important; namely:

1. User Adoption
2. Simplicit
3. Focus on Business
4. Support for End Users

Incidentally, you may notice that there are actually 9 suggestions, rather than 8. 

User Adoption

1 -- People are generally comfortable with the way they work on their daily tasks.  Many end users either don’t want to, or don’t have time to learn a new technology.  A typical day may consist of working on documents, spreadsheets and email.  When SharePoint comes along, it is often perceived to be a disruptive technology that’s being imposed upon them.  An important hurdle is training people on how easy SharePoint can be, especially with Office integration and daily tasks. (Laura Rogers, )

2 -- Deliver and show user value.  When using SharePoint as a social platform, it's important to help users to understand why they should use it and why they should take on the effort to tag an item, add comments or start to contribute content. It’s easy to deploy SharePoint, but if you want people to really use them, you have to sell and show the individual benefits of these social technologies to every single user. (Michael Greth, )

3 -- Provide the right kind of incentives.  Does your intranet solve a problem, lessen a pain point, or generally make your users’ jobs easier? If so, there is a natural incentive for them to use it. If not, they’re going to bypass SharePoint and find an easier way to get their work done. Resist the urge to award points or other extrinsic incentives for using SharePoint.  By making the reward for using SharePoint productivity, users will be more likely to use it because they want to, not because they have to.  (Marisa Peacock, ).

4 -- Find an in-house champion and ‘feed her’ on a regular basis.  User adoption is built around context. If you find someone who is using SharePoint, even in the simplest way, exposing and encouraging that solution will be much more relevant to end users than a massive solution pushed out by IT. (Mark Miller, ) 

Simplicity

5 -- Use Managed Metadata to simplify social interactions within companies.  SharePoint Server 2010 introduced the notion of managed metadata, a service that provides taxonomy and folksonomy tagging capabilities to the platform. Users tag new or existing content or configure libraries to automatically tag content. The tags are used in navigation scenarios as well as in search that adds automatic pivoting capabilities on the results of a search query. (Andrew Connell, @andrewconnell)                                                      

6 -- Strike the right balance between customization and third party add-ons.  Use a consumer-grade user experience design to make the platform more usable, and then look to third-party products to fill the main functional gaps, such as social networking and social sharing features. At all costs, avoid a Frankenstein’s monster created by too much in-code customization of the base platform. (Lee Bryant, )

Focus on Business

7 -- Change can’t be for changes sake; it needs a purpose.  Simply telling everyone you’re going to have to learn a new way of working as we are rolling out SharePoint isn’t going to win many friends. Instead, demonstrate real, measurable business benefits of the change. It’s not good enough to just say ‘We’re doing this so we can collaborate better’! Deliver something concrete, even something very simple like using Meeting Workspace, and provide measurable results.  For example, ‘Using Meeting Workspace we reduced time wasted by 15 minutes per meeting that were otherwise lost due to errors developing the agenda or being unable to find documents – which equates to 20 hours per week, saving $XXX per month’.  Once you have the idea that SharePoint can make a measurable difference, you will see people looking at other ways they can use it, thus increasing adoption and the value snowballs. (Andrew Woodward, )

8 -- Governance isn’t evil.  Often times, a governance plan is written and presented to the users as a set of rules to control their every movement. Don’t be a dictator. Show them how governance helps them by stopping IT from “doing whatever they want” and making SharePoint more consistent. With a clear policy on how information is organized, secured and retained in their hands, users will be confident about relying on SharePoint to do their job. (Shane Young, )

Support End Users

9 -- Supporting your business users is a critical component of getting users comfortable with SharePoint.  Here are three specific suggestions, courtesy of Joel Oleson ():

1. Build a SharePoint User Group/Community in your company with regular meetings.  Nothing is more helpful than being able to find out you're not the only one  struggling with an issue, and connecting with someone who already found a solution.  The community is invaluable when it comes to finding support and people who have ‘been there’ before you.
2. Make your SharePoint Team available in a scalable and non-threatening way - I've fond of setting up a sharing environment with  Q&A sessions and something new we’re calling ShareLabs, where people can ‘show and tell’ as well as ask us how to do things or get recommendations on strategic direction for a variety of uses around building sites and platform.
3. Make SharePoint End User Training Accessible Training - Brown bags, workshops and more formal single and multi-day training can help people gain the expertise needed to overcome that initial barrier to adoption.  A huge road block to SharePoint adoption is lack of understanding, despite an overwhelming need to use it, and people frustrated when SharePoint doesn't work like they expect.  Being forced to use something that is perceived to be worse than the previous solution is an ‘app killer’.  People need to get their hands wet before they jump in and use it.

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