Tuesday, May 20, 2008

End User Adoption - Mom's email...

It's amazing to me (and somewhat embarrassing I might add) that for the past 14 years, I've been implementing Enterprise Time and Attendance applications at some of the largest companies in North America and until recently had little to no insight into "performance support."

When Dan Peay (Vice President of Sales & Marketing for Transcensus) first showed me the SHO Guide product I was left speechless, and if you knew me, you would know that is quite a feat. Once I recovered from the initial shock, I began to think about all those years of answering the same question over and over about the same features in our applications.

A good personal example would be my Mom; she would call me regularly to ask how to open her web email. I would say in a calm helpful voice from 1,500 miles away, “open the browser… no it’s a hyperlink on your desktop, a hyperlink is a … forget that part… no the one that looks like a lower case e, no the blue one…” you get my drift... so when I got a hold of SHO Guide what do you think the first script I ever wrote was??? You got it… Mom’s email, I called it “CLICK HERE FOR EMAIL” and put it on her desktop in the middle of her screen.

Implementations of Enterprise software applications are not only challenging but costly, and end user adoption is much more difficult than showing Mom how to get to her email. Users who simply want to “get it done” without all the “rigamorol…” tend to revert to their old ways while you are pushing to get them to understand the benefits of the new way.

Bottom line, if you can provide a script that walks the end user through their given task or workflow, step by step within the application, you’ve just eliminated the majority of issues with early end user adoption.

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