4 things to consider when implementing collaboration technology. Any collaborative technology is difficult to implement because of change and you need to get users to adopt the software. So if you’re concerned about end user adoption, think about these 4c’s: context, convenience, closeness, and convergence.
Context. This is about focus, filtering, and providing visiblity — i.e. helping users to make sense of the digital mess of information that we manage for projects, clients, process, etc… AND putting it all within a secure context that users can easily understand and find later. You might think “it’s like a portal” — but it’s much more than a basic portal because an collaborative space is not just a means to display information, it provides a context to actually get work done.
Convenience. This is about usability and ease of use — again helping to keep things as simple as possible for end users. Fitting the technology into their daily work and personal lives. Making this technology easy means users adopt it. Once they adopt it — it’s hard to change as you just can’t work any other way.
Closeness. This about end users and understanding what they need, what they want, and how they work. If you think you can just “build it” and they will come, you are wrong. Some will understand this technology and become power users. As an IT organization, you need to empower those individuals to be change agents and educate them as much as possible. You also need to pick specific projects or “contexts” and be consultative with best practices.
Convergence. A buzz word that is now more popular. This about converging technologies. As technology converges within the context of communities – no matter how big or small they are — the focus still remains on things like convenience, context, and closeness to foster user adoption.
