User Adoption - Part 3: Sustained Utilization

The third and the most important step in an adoption strategy is to facilitate a sustained adoption of the social collaboration platform. Social Collaboration is not likely to reap in immediate returns, given the long term nature of community building. Hence one of the big risks enterprises face is the decline in the adoption rates with time.

Nurturing a vibrant community requires a strong user base, active engagement and positive word of mouth promotions.  Below strategies can help enterprise communities remain active even when left unattended for brief periods of time

• Accessibility

Your collaboration platform should ideally provide multiple mediums of access to increase the number of logins. This could include Desktops / Laptops, mobile phones and Tablets. Also it is advisable to provide a Single-Sign-On and make the system available through both intranet and internet.

•  Champions

For a collaboration platform to be successful, you need to form a core team of strong advocates (a.k.a Champions) who can help drive the initiative among other people. Champions will provide powerful examples, act as role models and mentors, evangelize your community and collaboration goals, and generally help supercharge adoption.

A champion should have the following qualities:

o   Energetic and self driven with a never say die attitude

o   Possess a good understanding of the platform features and be able to link it to business processes

o   Well networked within the organization

o   Respected within his area of influence

o   Innovative – willing to try out new methods to drive adoption 

The number of champions you should have will depend on the organization structure and use cases.

• Content

One of the biggest benefits of having a social collaboration solution is to centralize your organization's knowledge. This is as one of the primary driving factors for stakeholders visit the community and using it for their daily activities. It is critical to ensure presence of quality information on your social collaboration platform. Additionally, Users should be able to locate the correct information as quickly as possible. This is where features like Gamification help via features like ‘Correct Answer’

•  Rewards & Recognition

People often need some incentives to motivate them to do something.  Use of Gamification techniques like Missions, Badges, can help tailor experiences to maximize user productivity and reward key behaviors that reinforce the goals.These advanced gamification techniques can also be used by internal and external communities alike, allowing employees, customers, and partners to earn points and rewards for their contributions to business goals.

•  Success Stories

During the initial stages, it is important to highlight success stories even if they are small and build on them. This can be done via announcements, newsletters, webinars, etc. This help get the stakeholder trust within the system and also provides a good chance for other participant to gain new ideas on how to use the system better.

•  Technology Integration

Collaboration needs to happen not only at a business level but also at a technology level. Integrate Social Collaboration Platform with other complementary systems like CRM, Document Management, etc to allow a seamless flow of information.

•  Measure, Review and Improve

Gather Customer Insights and Customer Insights through community analytic reports. This will allow you to identify improvement areas to better align the platform to customer needs.

•  Focus on User Experience

User friendly GUI, Attractive themes and help mechanisms can go a long way to improve the user sentiment towards a community. Also you can look to include some innovative mechanisms similar to Google Doodle. After all, it is all about User Experience.

Rome wasn’t built in a day. And same is the case with user adoption. The trick is to have a systematic approach to it and make your stakeholders understand the VALUE of it.

“Training often gives people solutions to problems already solved. Collaboration addresses challenges no one has overcome before”— Marcia Conner

User Adoption - Part 2: Driving the Change

Once the awareness and initial momentum has been garnered through the platform rollout (read here), the next step is to spread the change across the organization. Regardless of the quality of your underlying social collaboration solution, it is important for your stakeholders to clearly understand the associated VALUE and facilitate a deep utilization for your solution

This is called a WIIFM (What’s in it for me?) proposition. Even within an organization, the reasons and motivations for using collaboration tool differs for people depending on their functions / roles. Hence it is critical to customize the message for different stakeholders in a language they will understand. This will entice them to include the solution as part of their daily tasks.

A typical WIIFM proposition should address the following aspects

• Why to Use the Tool?

The benefits of using a collaboration product should be clearly highlighted and these should ideally tie back to the existing pain points of the user 

•  How to Use the Tool?

This can be achieved by creating customized use cases which outline the steps for users to perform a task

A WIIFM position can be done based on Management Layers or by Functions as below. Please note that these are only examples and enterprises can use this as a base to define propositions and use cases of their own.

By Management Layers

Enterprise can choose to target all the three layers together or can follow a focused approach like Top Down, Bottom Up or Middle Out to drive the change

By Functions

Similarly, depending on the organization structure, WIIFM proposition can be designed for other functions as well.

“It is the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.” — Charles Darwin

User Adoption - Part 1: Building the Initial Momentum

A collaboration initiative can only be successful if there is rapid user adoption, in-depth utlization and ongoing use of the solution.  Business Stakeholders need to quickly & seamlessly connect with the people, content and resources they require to get their work done. By breaking down organizational silos, improving knowledge sharing and enabling speedy decisions, collaboration tools can help improve productivity and efficiency.

The most difficult part in all of this is making users embrace THE CHANGE. Any new system tends to bring a change in the way of working and hence is resisted by the business stakeholders, even if it results in “better, quicker, or cheaper”. This becomes tougher in case of modern systems like social business software which are new into the organization and people are still trying to come to terms with it. So what to do?

A successful adoption does not happen by accident; it requires careful planning and continuous efforts.  In my three part blog series, I intend to provide a structured approach to tackle the issue of user adoption.

The first step in any adoption strategy is building the initial momentum which leads to rapid user adoption. This can be achieved by choosing the right roll-out approach which can win the end user attention and generate excitement among them. Following are some popular roll-out strategies which can be employed for your collaboration solution:

1. Big Bang Rollout

In this approach, the rollout of the collaboration system happens in a single instance across the organization and so all stakeholders move to the new system on a given date. This approach is considered to be a little risky because there are very few learning opportunities incorporated in this. So a lot of pre-deployment preparation is required to make it successful.

2. Phased Rollout

In a phased approach, the rollout happens in multiple steps / phases and so the stakeholders are gradually moved to the new system. This approach allows learning from each phase to be incorporated into the subsequent phases and reduce risk; however this results in more time to Go-Live. Phased rollout can be done on the basis of Location, Business Unit, Modules or a combination of these

3. Parallel Rollout

Parallel approach involves rollout of the new system within an organization while the old system is still in play. This enables users to get used to the new system, and meanwhile do their work using the old system. The old system is then gradually rolled out. This method is least risky, however requires a lot of efforts from the users since they have to work with multiple systems at the start.

4. Viral Rollout

This is one of the most powerful and most risky methods of rollout available today. In this approach, the adoption is driven through word of mouth marketing i.e. users help get more users on-boarded on the system.

5. Pilot Conversion Rollout

Pilot Conversion requires involves rollout of the collaboration to a small group of test users for evaluation and testing before implementation across the organization. This enables enterprises to get a quick feedback on their product and identify areas of improvement to better align their solution the business needs. You can do multiple pilots before doing the final implantation.

6. Hybrid Rollout

Combination of two or more Approaches listed above.  Example could be deploying a new collaboration solution using a Phased and Parallel jointly

Following table provides a comparison between these approaches using some key considerations

As you can see, each approach listed above has its set of advantages and disadvantages. So depending on the weightage you assign to the factors mentioned above, you can choose the rollout strategy which works best with your enterprise culture.

Following are some Best Practices to help you get the most of your Rollout Strategy

• Understand your audience and organizational set up well before proceeding to shortlist the rollout approach
• Leverage experiences from similar product implementations done in the past
• Connect with users from other enterprises in the forums and learn from their experiences
• Solution roll-out strategies should be complemented by effective training and marketing strategies

"Gettin' good players is easy. Gettin' 'em to play together is the hard part." — Casey Stengel 

Defining Collaboration Strategy - A Framework

Collaboration tools offer a wide range of benefits to enterprises, right from cost reductions to increased productivity / innovation as well as knowledge consolidation. However, realizing these benefits is easier said than done. Often, firms who have deployed collaboration solutions in the past have failed to get the expected ROI. The main reason – Absence of a clear strategy!

To derive value from their investments, companies must look at collaboration as more than just a technology deployment or having the "right" tools in place. Rather, It’s about creating a culture and defining the way an organization should function.

Let’s assume you are planning a road trip with your family to a destination you have never been before. Do you simply pack and hit the road? Or do you carefully plan the key elements of your journey like the best route, boarding and lodging arrangements, starting time, etc? For most of us, I think it will be the latter.

On a similar note, collaboration is like a journey and a comprehensive strategy is a critical component of any collaboration programme which can help maximize the benefits out of your investments. The following approach provides you with a framework to define a sound strategy for your initiative:

As-Is State (The Point of Origin)

• Analyze your Organization Culture / Degree of Openness – As a first step, you should understand the key tenets of your organizational culture. Is your organization Flat or Hierarchal? How freely do communications happen in your organization? Is the collaboration internal, external, global or business line focused? How open are people to embrace change?
• Identify the Collaboration Patterns – Know the types of communications that happen, the key processes and stakeholders involved as well as the frequency of these communications. Communications can be synchronous (real-time) or asynchronous (offline) and your strategy should address both these types.
• Assess your Collaboration Maturity Level – What kind of tools currently exist in your organization (e.g. Video Conferencing, Emails, etc), how effective are they and what are the gaps / challenges in the current set up.

To-Be State (The Destination)

• Aligns with Corporate Vision – Every organization has a vision and it is important for your collaboration strategy to complement it. For e.g., if you want to be a ‘Customer First’ organization, your strategy should stress on how your collaboration solution will ultimately help achieve better service for customers.
• Meets Business Goals / Objectives – Be absolutely clear on what you want to achieve out of your collaboration initiative. Merely stating high level goals is not enough; you need to specify both short term and long term goals with defined targets.
• Performance Metrics – Define some metrics to judge the performance of your programme and check if it is on track. As an example, A business goal could be to ‘Foster Innovation’ within the company and the metric to measure it could be “Number of new ideas generated’.

Strategic Roadmap (The Journey)

• Product Selection – For a collaboration strategy to be successful, choosing a technology which meets your requirements is very important. Rather than falling for a tool that ‘Gives it All’, opt for a tool which fits your needs better. Read one of my earlier blog on this topic for more details.
• Architecture and Functional Guidelines – Building collaboration architecture touches all key aspects of an enterprise from its people to technology including hosting models, integration requirements, etc. It helps to visualize how your solution will fit in the existing technology landscape. Additionally, depending on your existing processes and business imperatives, you need to specify functional guidelines like system accesses / rights, security aspects like session timeouts, etc. 
• Implementation Plan – A detailed plan defining the key steps, timelines, owners and dependencies helps to track the progress of your collaboration initiative as well as provides a focus on the features planned to be implemented. 
• Use Cases – Defining sample use cases will answer the question ‘How will the technology ultimately align with my processes to fulfill the needs?’ For eg, you can create a use case workflow showing how your social collaboration tool can be used to generate new ideas. 
• Adoption Strategy – Merely deploying a strategy is not enough. Your stakeholders need to embrace it for you to gain the desired results. Choose the best way to deploy your solution – Big Bang, Viral or Phased Approach. Each approach has its pros and cons and you need to carefully consider which one will work best with your users. Adoption mechanisms (like Rewards & Incentives, Mobile Apps, etc) can improve usage of the collaboration system once it gets deployed.  
• Marketing & Awarness Strategy – Devise marketing strategies (emails, blogs, etc) to create awareness among end users about the product, the Go-Live dates and How it can benefit the users. 
• Training and Enablement – Plan system walkthroughs to familiarize end users with the collaboration solution and its key features. Creating Help files, Introduction videos and FAQ documents could be good resources for users to refer in case they get stuck somewhere. 
• Risk Identification – Identify key risks and their mitigation strategies to ensure a smooth Governance.

Key Points to be kept in mind

• At the start of the initiative, have a mechanism (like surveys) to capture the pain points from your stakeholders perspective
• Buy-in from Senior Management is critical. For your initiative to become successful, the drive needs to come from the TOP. 
• Introducing New Social Tools does not mean that you need to do away with Traditional Collaboration Tools like Emails. You can pair both the technologies to address your gaps better.
• Social is entering organizations through a variety of tools. Most content management systems like Sharepoint, Adobe CQ, etc have started incorporating social features in their new releases. It is important to ensure your business stakeholders don’t get confused and know the purpose of each system clearly.
• Review the performance of your collaboration programme on a regular basis and re-work your strategy, if required.

“Unity is strength... when there is teamwork and collaboration, wonderful things can be achieved.” — Mattie Stepanek

How to Choose the Right Collaboration Platform for your Business?

Enterprise Collaboration solutions have been termed as Game Changers and are in huge demand. Leading Analysts like IDC have predicted the Enterprise Collaboration Software Market to grow at ~40% YOY and become a $4.3 bn market by 2016. This in-turn has encouraged a lot of product vendors to invest and enter this market.

THE PROBLEM

The Collaboration Software market has become a highly fragmented ecosystem with hundreds of products to choose from. Even worse, most of these platforms provide similar features & functionalities, making it difficult to differentiate between them. As a result, it often becomes a confusing affair for customers to decide which product to opt for.

THE SOLUTION

The best fit collaboration platform for your business is one which provides powerful social networking features and seamlessly integrates into your organization’s culture, processes and strategy. The following 12 parameters, grouped under business, product and vendor considerations, can help you evaluate and ascertain which platform will fit your needs the best: 

Business Consideration

1. Aligns with Organizational Strategy 

To start off, it is very important to understand that collaboration is not about simply deploying a technology, but a lot more. It’s about embedding a culture within the organization. Implementing the platform is just the start; you need to have a clear strategy roadmap for your collaboration needs and your platform should complement it.  

2. Addresses Your Pain Points 

Identify the key business imperatives / challenges you are trying to address and accordingly proceed to evaluate the strengths of the platforms you have shortlisted. Business imperatives are likely to differ across enterprises. For e.g. one organization may want collaboration tools to improve customer service while some other organization may require it to foster innovation.

3. Cost

Collaboration solutions follow different pricing mechanisms (freemium, subscription based, per user based, etc) and are available in a range of prices. Depending on your budget and the number of users expected to use the solution, you can choose a tool which fits.  

Product Consideration

4. Features  

This is one of the primary factors to evaluate while deciding which tool to go ahead with. You should choose a product which will solve your business needs rather than a product which is stuffed with features. For e.g., if you have offices across geographic locations and have frequent meetings, choosing a platform with a strong video conferencing facilities will work best.

5. Usability & Customizations

In order to ensure that you're making it as easy as possible for your employees to take advantage of social collaboration software, it's important to choose a platform that is user friendly and has a neat display. Additionally, highly customizable software enable you to do a lot of bespoke development and better align the solution with your brand & culture.  Some of the basic customizations you may want could include adding corporate logo and color schemes, changing layouts, etc.

6. Hosting  

Social Collaboration Solutions can be hosted on-cloud, on-premise or in a hybrid model. Most collaboration solutions offer the flexibility to host in any of the above models depending upon your requirements. As a trend, it is seen that banking / financial customers have a tendency to opt for on-premise solutions whereas Small and Medium scale enterprises have a preference for on-cloud implementations

7. Integration  

Collaboration needs to happen not only at a business level, but also at a technology level. Your collaboration solution should be able to integrate with your existing technology set-up and allow seamless flow of information.

8. Mobility  

Mobility is one of the key aspects of any collaboration platform as it improves accessibility and results in better user adoption of the platform. A preferred collaboration platform should provide support for majority of mobility platforms (like iOS, Android, etc), if not all.

9. Security 

Any platform that you should choose should have appropriate security measures incorporated at application and infrastructure level. Some of the common measures include Encryption mechanisms, Security Monitoring tools, Authentication & Authorization, etc. 

10. Scalability 

Scalability is another aspect which should be considered while choosing a platform. The platform should be robust enough to support a growth in the user base as well as the platform usage

Vendor Consideration

11. Experience 

A good parameter to evaluate the vendor is to check for examples of any similar scale implementations they have done in the past for other customers. Success Stories and Use Cases from these experiences can help you determine how well the product will fit with your processes.

12. Support & Vision 

Each product vendor has their own support model for their platform. It is very important to assess the cost, coverage (24x7 or 16x5, email or phone, etc) and SLA’s of support provided by the vendor. As an example, for critical deployments like social customer service forums, it is highly recommended to select vendors which provide 24x7 support.  Another important aspect while shortlisting a product vendor is to understand product roadmap including planned features and version release frequency. 

Choosing the right collaboration platform can give an organization a significant competitive edge, while a wrong decision can threaten its very survival. With the above questions answered, you would find yourself better armed to evaluate the myriad social collaboration platforms and strategically select the best fit platform (or platforms) to meet your business requirements.

“Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success.” — Henry Ford

Six W’s of Enterprise Social Collaboration

WHAT is Enterprise Social Collaboration?

Enterprise Social Collaboration is the process which brings all key business stakeholders including employees, customers, partners, etc on a single platform and enables them to share information, discuss ideas and allow a seamless flow of knowledge across the enterprise.  

Collaboration is one of the top buzz words in the corporate world today and is considered as a basic element for any organization to sustain and grow.  With most enterprises planning to go Digital, Social Collaboration forms one of the key elements in their strategy.

HOW is it different from Social Networking?

Enterprise Social Collaboration is similar to Social Networking Sites like Facebook in a lot of ways, the key distinction being that while Social Networking is Individual focused, Social Collaboration is more Group Focused and aims at improving inter and intra organizational workgroup communication

WHY is it required?

With organizations expanding globally by leaps and bounds, some of the common issues faced within organizations today include Teams working in Silos, Difficulty in locating experts / information, Information not getting shared across functions,  Lack of Innovation, etc. Social Collaboration Solutions are aimed to overcome these issues and improve business productivity.

WHO is supposed to use it?

Social Collaboration tools can be used by all key business stakeholders. Depending on the business requirements, Social Collaboration solutions can be employed organization wide across locations or can be limited to specific functions like HR, Sales, etc.

WHERE can it be employed?

Social Collaboration Platforms can be employed in the following service areas      

• Social Intranet – Platforms for business stakeholders to collaborate and share information
• Social Customer Service Forums – Online forums for customers to raise queries and service requests
• Social Sales and Marketing – Extension of Customer Service Forums for Marketing & Lead Generation

Social Collaboration Solutions have a variety of use cases like Internal Communications, Employee Engagement, Expertise Location, Innovation, etc

WHICH is the best social collaboration tool for your business?

Currently, the most common medium for collaboration within enterprises is Email. However, there are a lot of social business software available the market, both free and paid, which are specifically meant to improve people-to-people collaboration within organizations. They can be categorized as follows -  

• Specialists – Pure play Social Business Software Vendors like Jive
• Horizontal Platforms – Packaged Solutions like Microsoft, Google
• Vertical Platforms – Extensions to existing platform like Salesforce Chatter

Choosing the best fit tool for your business depends on lot of factors like Organization Culture / Structure, Business Imperatives, Cost, Integration Requirements, etc.  There are free trial versions provided by most product vendors which help in evaluation.

“Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much”  ― Helen Keller