The Trinity of User Adoption
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This is the hottest topic I have heard this week. Everyone seems to be talking about or concerned over user adoption. I understand the consternation. User adoption can make or break your BI program, it drives your ROI and it’s the mechanism for how value gets delivered to the organization. The more users you have, the better information your organization has to make informed decisions. But user adoption can be quite elusive. I admit that it’s the one topic that theoretically I understand but in practice has tripped me up more than once.
Based on my ‘trip-ups’ I have designed the “Trinity of User Adoption” the three things that if you don’t do will jeopardize user adoption. This isn’t an inclusive list, but I believe covers the key problem areas.
1. Trust: if your users don’t trust the data, nothing else you do matters. Trust is related to data quality, data governance, metadata and good communication. It’s really easy to erode trust and nearly impossible to get back.
2. Ease of Use: I have something I call the User Continuum and it helps my customers think about their users in three different categories. The value to that is you are better prepared to design a GUI that is consumable for a variety of different skill sets. This is a big challenge for many BI programs, our tendency to focus on high end users such as analysts isolates the majority of the users—and the opposite is true too.
3. Training: If you think training your users once is enough you should determine how they use the program. If they are logging in once a month, or once a quarter I guarantee you they are not going to remember how to use it.
I hope that this list resonates with you, and helps you address user adoption in your program.
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