Trent at Coveo blogged that slow adoption for technologies has been the leading cause of underperformance, and wonders whether a more intentional approach is required:

“However, despite this acceleration, broad adoption of new technologies often takes years. For while some people are eager to explore what is “new”, the majority will always be hesitant to change. This very human reality and our awkwardness in dealing with it is part of the cause for the relatively low information systems (IS) adoption rates we have experienced in the last twenty-five years.

In my experience, when an information system was deployed to people who had no choice – who were required to use the application each day as a central part of their job – with time and training, adoption can reach 100%. However, when we have deployed IS projects that are optional, adoption rates tend to be in the 15 – 40% range. And in a firm that requires collaborative work, some of these systems have little value unless almost everybody participates. In these cases, slow and/or incomplete adoption can effectively kill an otherwise great project, not to mention the loss of time and money invested in the project.“

I fully agree – and this is why I wrote a whole book on user adoption for collaboration technologies and approaches. Adoption is the BIGGEST issue, and by taking a more intentional approach – which is what Chapter 1 talks about and the rest of the book develops into specific approaches and strategies – you get much better performance.

Read more: Coveo: The “Intentional Approach to Technology Adoption – Part 1