There are many reasons that are given for why adoption is so low.  Things like:  “business users don’t understand math or logic.”  Really?  Let’s do the math on that.  (Don’t worry, this will be easy).  If 90% of business users don’t understand math or logic, how do any of us have jobs or get paid?

I think the real reason behind low adoption is because we think of these projects all wrong.  The truth is, BI isn’t an IT project, and when we manage them like they are, and say to our business users “look at this tool we built for you”, we miss the mark.  BI deployments (not the work to install or develop) are a change management opportunity.

In order for any change to be successful, it has to start and be supported from the top, but, employees must be at the center of the process improvement efforts.  A constant, gentle pressure that is internally motivated (like BI as a strategic differentiator) will get the best results.  Most importantly, you can’t change what you don’t know.  So, until you have been in your users shoes and understand their reasons for not adopting you still have some work to do.

To improve your likelihood of success, your best bet is to optimize everyone’s skill sets.  The best thing to do (besides bringing your business with you) is to hand over the deployment tasks to an internal group of business users that have the accountability for BI to be successful and the credibility as business users, while the IT team continues to be responsible for the work that they are best at.

Working with IT and business side-by-side is the first step to healing our Achilles heel, and improving user adoption. It sounds so easy, doesn’t it?

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.