6 Steps to Accelerating Adoption, ROI

Prepare for the technology rollout. Organizations must be able to clearly identify what they want to accomplish. Are they investing in communications technology to reduce communication spend and travel expenses? Are they trying to implement or expand teleworking programs? Are they trying to optimize business processes? Many times its a combination of all of these and once the business goals have been identified, the solution can be more effectively rolled out.

Conduct a pilot program. Identify key user groups  typically outside of IT and in a few key departments (sales, customer service, engineering, human resources, etc.), as well as solicit participation from the help desk. A business unit manager should be designated as the technology evangelist, who will promote the specific benefits of this new communications technology to company employees. Similarly, if possible, an organization should look to include an executive in the pilot since having executive sponsorship will facilitate user adoption.

Create awareness. Marketing should draft a brief statement, to be distributed internally, that outlines the benefits in efficiency and flexibility that the new solutions will provide to both employees and the organization as a whole. The company could produce a broad range of multimedia campaigns, including e-mails, posters, flyers and videos highlighting these benefits and display them in common office meeting areas.

Train users. To train end-users, an organization should offer customized, live, interactive training tailored to each working groups environment at times convenient to the end-user. After the live training, work with users to address technical questions that arise through online training, cheat sheets and even internal collaborative sites.

Follow through. An organization can facilitate employee adoption of new solutions by creating an end-user community blog or message board where employees can discuss video conferencing, telepresence, etc. among themselves and by linking to these sites on the companys collaborative site. To go a step further, organizations should conduct periodic surveys to gauge employee adoption and to elicit feedback on what IT could do better or what may be lacking.

Follow through again. Once the solutions have been implemented, organizations should continue to check in with employees and regularly monitor whether they are using the solutions properly by using benchmark surveys to monitor employee use. If employees are not taking full advantage of the new system, this will help uncover why. This is also where innovation and improvement takes place as employees can drive the future of the platform with new features or integration to business applications and processes.