SharePoint, with its collaborative and social tools, behaves more like Facebook than an ERP system. Since users are also content creators, an increase in users leads to an increase in valuable content, driving further users to rely on the site.
hus, SharePoint operates under a network effect. This has positive and negative implications. If you can drive adoption to critical mass, sustained use is possible with little upkeep. On the other hand, if that critical mass of users is not reached, adoption will sputter and fail. This makes measuring adoption critical.
You should use SharePoint’s suite of tools for measuring use to ensure adoption is consistently on the upswing. Third-party and custom tools are available to supplement what SharePoint offers out of the box as well. As management guru Peter Drucker says, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” This is especially true of user adoption, which is very easy to measure with the right tools.
We recommend that you appoint someone to be in charge of monitoring changes in use across the system. This person is responsible for reporting back to the governance committee with updates about which groups are using the system more, which are using it less, and the uptake of new features as they are added to the system.
Before you implement a new SharePoint site, you should ask yourself the following questions:
• Do you have someone with the necessary skill that can spend about 5 hours each week monitoring adoption?
• Are you familiar with SharePoint’s out-of-the-box tools for monitoring adoption, and are they sufficient, or do you need to buy or build additional tools?
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