Content FeedOne of the most common areas in which Collaboration Matters is asked to consult with our customers is to assist them with driving adoption of Social Collaboration tools - finding the right ways in which to encourage an organisation's users to embrace the new technology, to make it part of their regular working practices and thus to (eventually) change the organisation's culture towards being a more collaborative one.
You may ask why do you need to 'drive' the adoption of such tools when they are intended to be very intuitive to use, beneficial to the end user and to (in many cases) grow organically?
Put simply, because as individuals we're all busy and we're all different. We all have too much to do in too little time, have established methods of working, are continually being asked to take on more. That makes it hard to 'make time' to adopt new tools, even if they will prove more useful and thus make us more productive in the long run. Different? Every organisational culture and individual working practice varies and which adoption trigger works for one user (say, a 21-year old marketing intern in an advertising company) isn't necessarily going to work as well for another (a 50-something Operations Manager in a manufacturing business).
Done well, a plan to drive adoption will make your investment into Social Collaboration a worthwhile one, with high rates of use, employee satisfaction and real productivity gains. Done badly, social software could be seen as a white elephant - an experiment that never worked... We all want to avoid that scenario!
At Collaboration Matters we are steadily extending our portfolio of services to help our customers to drive adoption of all Social Collaboration tools, particularly Lotus Connections, and so I was interested to see that IBM had clearly identified the need to assist customers in this area too. There's nothing too ground-breaking in this new whitepaper 'Driving adoption of Lotus Connections', but it provides some common-sense approaches all the same:
Enterprise social software is gaining practical currency now as analysts' auspicious forecasts begin to be realized with the first wave of early adopters. This new class of software taps informal interactions and relationships among workers with complementary interests, skills, and knowledge, offering new ways to engage the collective intelligence of organizations towards achieving business ends. As such it represents an evolutionary advance in collaboration as a means to higher productivity and competitiveness.The whitepaper takes this methodology:
The industry's first integrated suite of enterprise social software, IBM Lotus Connections, became available in June 2007. Featuring five Web 2.0-based components - Profiles, Blogs, Dogear (social bookmarking), Communities, and Activities — Lotus Connections provides a full palette of capabilities that help people find expertise and information and build new relationships based on business needs. Since coming onto the market, sales of this product have continued to be robust. And now there is a growing body of deployment tips and best practices new purchasers can employ to promote steady adoption and productive use of these tools in their own environments.
If you are thinking about bringing Lotus Connections into your organization in future or have already purchased it and are planning how to manage the introduction to your user population, read on for tips about getting started.
* Plan for successand then expands on each area, e.g.
* (1) Identify goals for the deployment
* (2) Pilot the application(s) being rolled out
* (3) Define and execute an adoption plan for the wider community
* Repeat
(1) Identify goals for the deploymentThe document is well worth a read, if only to confirm your own approach to deploying Lotus Connections or other social tools.
Goals should be business goals, not just usage goals. That is, they should target specific business advantages that use of the new tools might be expected to yield because adoption of this software has to be driven by business need and culture - the technology alone cannot drive it. Any task, activity or process that can be accelerated, enriched, made more productive, cost-effective or innovative by people sharing what they know could be a suitable focus for goal-setting. Some examples might be to:
* Enable employees to locate expertise and information on topics they need faster
* Facilitate increased communication across teams, business units, geographies while reducing the burden on email, which is not designed to be a many-to-many communication platform
* Stimulate creativity to generate new ideas for products, services and go-to-market strategies
* Improve ability to respond more rapidly to customer needs and inquiries
* Reduce rework and improve quality of people's delivery materials
* Decrease the learning curve for new employees
* Make better decisions, knowing they were vetted by experts across the organization and reflect past experience
Goal-setting can of course be an iterative process, and there will be short-term and well as long-term goals. One way to approach the first round of goal setting is to think about groups of people in the organization who may be particularly well-suited to participate in a pilot, because the choice of a pilot audience can influence the selection of initial goals. You may want to identify your pilot population first and then mutually agree on the goals with them instead of doing it the other way around.
Remember, unless your organisation is 100% staffed with tech-savvy, self-training, self-motivated, evangelistic knowledge workers (!) just 'throwing' tools such as Lotus Connections out there isn't going to work. You need to find the right methodology to make Social Collaboration a success, just as you would with any other IT investment or organisational change. If you'd like to find out more, get in touch.
