Neochange | Driving Effective User Adoption

The first quarter of 2007 was a significant milestone for Neochange. I feel we have made real progress in our efforts to move the software industry towards effective user adoption. Over the past three months, four Fortune 100 companies have retained us to develop and support their adoption strategies. Just as important, we established three new partnerships with market leading software vendors to drive effective user adoption for their customers.

Next quarter I hope to be able to share with you the work-in-progress engagement of what we consider our first EUA software vendor transformation project. We are working with the leadership team of a progressive software vendor with the goal of infusing Effective User Adoption into their company's DNA. We expect the financial results for this software provider will be significant in both the short and long-term as their customers realize higher rates of adoption and value realization.

As the market trend towards Software as a Service (SaaS) unfolds, client requests for adoption assistance of those solutions have increased. From a user adoption standpoint, the SaaS model has some definite pros and cons. Already we are seeing that some clients have unrealistically high expectations of the SaaS delivery model from a user adoption perspective. We have outlined some observations from our experiences in the following opinion piece with the hope of saving enterprise software buyers some unnecessary grief.

Opinion Piece - 3 things you MUST know in order to achieve Effective User Adoption™ with SaaS

SaaS is likely heading for an effective user adoption expectation gap because of one key assumption that enterprise buyers often make - the assumption that the software by itself can deliver effective user adoption in complex business environments. Clearly, this assumption is unrealistic when you consider the collective social complexity and change capacity of hundreds or thousands of users. Imagine, the myriad of competing needs and interests that are typically associated with enterprise software deployments and then factor in the volume of competing initiatives that are concurrently in play.

Even so, like any expectation gap there are insights that, if understood and acted upon, can narrow the gap without the necessity of setting our sights too low. This opinion piece offers three insights that are critical to closing this expectation gap and will enable enterprise buyers to capitalize on the strengths of SaaS to deliver significant business value.

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The results from the following statistics for CRM deployments were presented in this year's CSO Insights survey and analysis study entitled, "Sales Performance Optimization" - CSO Insights, 2007:

Point of view

"Ultimately, though, the main factor that will determine adoption rate is the system's value to the users. If they experience a personal payback for investing the time and effort to learn and use the system, they will integrate that system into their daily workflow." - "Sales Performance Optimization", CSO Insights - 2007

This seemingly common sense observation is often overlooked by many enterprise software buyers and gets straight to the heart of one of the biggest problems with enterprise software deployments.

It is often the case that the software functionality deployed is of little value to the majority of end-users, but very valuable collectively to the organization.

If we stay with the CRM context, the organizational benefits resulting from improved visibility into sales processes and customer's needs are obvious - increased revenues. But without functionality that truly improves the productivity and satisfaction of front-line sales employees, enterprise buyers are unlikely to achieve the necessary levels of adoption and data quality required to support revenue aspirations.

This "polarity of interests" - management visibility versus frontline employee enablement - is a common problem for most software verticals. In the long run, organizations would be better off to start with employee enablement as the driving criteria for their enterprise software deployments.

This employee first focus ensures a strong foundation of commitment towards the new application from which broader organizational benefits can be realized. It is much more difficult to be successful deploying from a visibility / control perspective first.

Software 2007 - Santa Clara, CA, May 8th - 9th, 2007
Neochange has been invited to the gathering of 2,000 software industry executives to discuss Effective User Adoption™ Strategies that drive innovation in business models and services. Other speakers include Microsoft's Steve Ballmer and Salesforce.com's Marc Benioff.

SLAM 2007 Conference - Denver, CO, June 6th - 7th, 2007
Neochange will present Effective User Adoption™ Strategies to key executives, managers and consultants of leading and fast-growth software companies.
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TPSA Forum: The Service Chasm - San Francisco, CA, March 20th, 2007
Neochange discussed adoption challenges that arise from changing service expectations between enterprise software buyers and their software providers. Other speakers included noted Technology Marketing guru Geoffrey Moore, author of "Crossing the Chasm", and TPSA Executive Director Thomas Lah.

Selling Power's Sales Leadership Conference - Seattle, WA, March 7th, 2007
Neochange and CRM experts discussed why CRM software has failed to improve sales productivity and why a successful technology implementation doesn't necessarily equate to effective use of the application.