User adoption: the wave 2 challenge

I read Michael Sampson’s new book “User Adoption Strategies” with great interest and flagged a lot of gems I found, some of which I will share here. I’ll let you discover the others.

It’s not the early adopters we need to worry about: it’s all the others.

The subtitle of the book says it all: “Shifting second wave people to new collaboration technology”.

I am currently looking at the preliminary data from the current Global Intranet Strategies Survey,  of which social media is a large part. Here is a preliminary statistic:

• Out of over 200 responding organizations who have some degree of social media in place internally, nearly 40 % express ‘moderate concern’ about user adoption and just over 15% express ‘strong concern’. (Choices were “not a concern”, “low”, “moderate”, “strong” or “very strong”.)

I know from personal experience with my clients that user adoption is a concern for intranets in general, unless they have reached Stage 3 in maturity. In this case they are the “way of working” for the organization and have been fully “adopted”!  Most have not yet reached that stage, thus the interest in Michael’s topic.

Michael talks about the “levers for change”: “pain”, “social pressure”, “perceived deviance from the norm”, “better defaults”, “getting pleasure” and “linkage to a higher goal”. This is an intriguing list, and well worth the price of the book to read what he has to say about these levers. (as of page 68)

Another gem is his thoughts on why the “what’s in it for me” concept may be a bad way to think of user adoption. (page 77.)

Michael takes us through the model he propose in detail, with lost of examples.  His model is based on 4 stages:

• Winning attention
• Cultivating basic concepts
• Enlivening applicability (my favorite stage!)
• Making it real

The tongue twister “enlivening applicability” simply means you bring alive how the application can be relevant and useful for the person.

“User Adoption Strategies” makes very interesting reading, let alone the fact that you will never see “user adoption” in exactly the same way after finishing this book. At 39 US$, this book is a very good deal.

- – -

Note that the on-going, 5th annual Global Intranet Strategies Survey is  open until September 1st. You still have plenty of time to sign up and get a free copy of “Global Intranet Trends for 2011″ (commercial value 750 USD, 550 euros).

Comments are now closed