Goals for Adoption

To begin developing your adoption strategy, you need to lay out some goals. As discussed before, when creating goals it is important to be S.M.A.R.T. about it. The adoption goals set by the governance team need to be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely. While these goals will necessarily be unique to each situation, there are some common themes to keep in mind:

• You need to win the hearts and minds of users. Your ultimate goal is to make the portal the place where users naturally to go to find and share information.
• You want to engage users early to begin using and contributing to the portal. Getting a continuous flow of fresh content into the portal will go a long way toward engaging users' interest.
• The portal's content should continue to grow and evolve as the users find new and innovative ways to use it. Be sure that this progress is measured and communicated back to the user community.
• Do not forget why the portal was implemented in the first place. The organization identified a problem to be solved and implemented this solution in the hopes of delivering a return on its investment (ROI).

The portal needs to show a return on investment, but there are two parts to the ROI of a portal. The quantitative ROI comes from the time and money saved by the use of the system. This may be an increase in productivity or the ability to complete some process that was not possible in the past. This type of ROI can be difficult to measure but there are many tools and known techniques for doing so.

To drive user adoption there needs to be a qualitative ROI as well. This comes from making life better and easier for the users. This is a return on the investment the users make in learning and adapting to a new way of doing business.

It isn't always true that “if you build it, they will come.” You stand a much better chance of getting people in the door on a hot day if you have good air conditioning. The goal of your adoption plan will be to ensure that everyone knows that you now have air conditioning!