Enterprise technology platforms (like SAP, Oracle, and Salesforce) improve an organization’s productivity and streamline day-to-day tasks. The implementation of this technology requires careful planning to achieve appropriate levels of adoption by all end users, and there are some deep-rooted ideas about enterprise technology adoption that hurt everyone involved—both the frontline users and the organization.
Let’s dispel some common myths and discover how to increase your adoption rate, and therefore, realize a greater return on your investment in an enterprise technology system.
Myth 1. Technology is so prevalent in our lives that we don’t need to worry about providing training or online resources for using a new platform.
This impulse makes sense. Employees are already using tools like Zoom and Microsoft Teams and Outlook to communicate, plan, and execute goals at work, and they use multiple social media apps in their personal lives. But we should not assume adopting entirely new systems in the workplace is as easy as sending a Teams chat message or scrolling through Facebook.
With personal technology, people have the luxury of making mistakes with little to no consequences. But with workplace technology, there are important and complex business roles to consider. Employees likely do not have an intimate understanding of why a technology is important, so you must provide quality reference content to new users.
Myth 2. We don’t need to create custom content for our employees because we have super users who can help everyone.
Super users, or people highly familiar with the new software, are critical to the adoption solution. These individuals know both their coworkers and the software. But super users are not superhuman. If you rely on them to be the primary source of knowledge, they will inevitably become overloaded and burned-out helping others master new systems while also staying on top of their usual jobs.
New workplace technology demands that you plan to make a repository of relevant content accessible to users. People may move around an organization, but reference information should always remain in the same place so that it can be added to and updated as required.
Myth 3. Our employees are modern learners who prefer online, self-paced references, so there’s no need to provide live training workshops or Q&A forums for technology adoption.
The learning preferences of your employees can and should be explored in a learning needs assessment before content is ever created and a solution is even considered. However, providing a blended learning journey to your people creates a modern learning journey. A blended learning journey will lead to the most success and make learning content as palatable as possible.
Despite what you might think, many people want some live, expert-led workshops. We want to offer what they need to learn best, but live training isn’t always the best option. Live webinars can direct people to items they can explore and consult when a need arises on the job, which means the live training events should be viewed as a building block for the rest of an adoption solution.
Myth 4. The project team can create the learning content for the technology adoption; they know what they’re doing.
In many cases, the project team leading a technology adoption does have the knowledge others need. But these individuals are so deep in the functional technology that they cannot recall being at the beginner level. Documenting a project team member’s depth of knowledge is not the best solution for frontline users. Users just need to know what to do from one screen to the next; they don’t need to know the reason behind every element of every page.
Another issue with this misconception is that the project team is typically very time constrained, and when a project is on a schedule, the team is already multitasking. Having dedicated instructional designers create learning content is the safest bet because they have a different perspective on the technology and understand the needs of the people who will use it.
