One of the consistent challenges facing organizations today is how to get sustained user adoption for organizational business change projects. User adoption is directly linked to Return on Investment. If there is no behavior change (meaning adoption) there is no Return on Investment for the business change project.
We find that organizations are very focused on building a financial business case up-front for initiatives. Business and technical objectives are determined, but rarely are the human objectives for the business change project also identified. What is it that people will be doing differently as a result of this business change project? How will user adoption be measured?
There is some
recent research focused specifically on
IT user adoption that points out (once again) that the human elements of IT implementations are the key to accelerated user adoption for these business change projects. The research notes that while there has been improvement in user adoption rates, they still remain at about 50%-- meaning that almost half the targets of the business change project are not adopting the technology on a sustained basis.
This failure to gain full adoption is a problem for types of all business change projects-- not just technology changes.
If these human objectives aren't identified up front then it is difficult to measure whether or not they have been achieved on the back end. That's why defining the change, including defining the human objectives, is an important component of the
Accelerating Implementation Methodology (AIM.) Labels: business change projects, human objectives, user adoption