4 Keys to SharePoint Adoption: Key #1

4 Keys to SharePoint Adoption: Key #1

 

Key #1: Valuable Content

In this Four Part Blog Series, we will focus on, what we think are, the most important solutions to achieving a higher SharePoint Adoption rate inside an organization.

SharePoint Adoption Rate: 22%

Everyone talks about SharePoint adoption because the national statistic is a stunningly low 22% .  That is only 22% of the employees in an entire organization that has SharePoint actually uses it on a daily basis. This statistic is frightening not just because of the unrealized investment, but because achieving complete adoption is so easy!
Being involved with a company that has built and branded so many SharePoint sites you would think that I would naturally focus on modifying and improving the appearance of SharePoint, but I’ll save that for another day.  The most important key to SharePoint adoption, is Valuable Content.

Intranet Urban Sprawl

To illustrate this point, let’s imagine a tremendously unsuccessful SharePoint environment with absolutely terrible end-user adoption.

It’s navigation makes no sense at all, search doesn’t work very well, the branding that’s been applied is a nightmarish mixture of colors, with horrendous fonts and images.

To make matters worse, it’s been in place for a couple of years and the lack of governance has resulted in the SharePoint version of urban sprawl.  Sites are everywhere and no one knows who owns them or what’s in them.

If this sounds like an environment that you wouldn’t want to touch with a 10 foot pole, you’d be right.  However, no matter how unattractive the environment is, if you were to place coupons for free dinners, automobiles and vacation homes throughout the site collection, you would have every employee completely combing the entire environment immediately.

Nobody Cares What the Treasure Chest Looks Like

As much as I would personally like to think that SharePoint Branding is so important, the truth is that content is king.

When you think about it, nobody digging up a pirates’ treasure chest cares about the appearance of the chest.  It’s what’s inside that counts.

While it’s true that your operational budget will probably prohibit you from giving away houses, cars or even a Starbucks coupon, the truth of the matter is that simply providing documents and information that seriously benefits the employees will dramatically improve SharePoint Adoption.

If the information that you provide benefits the employees on a daily basis they will become daily users of your intranet.

Of course then, they will start complaining about the terrible branding, poor search performance and the urban sprawl.  In coming articles in this series, we will cover those issues.