Answer to SharePoint Adoption: Surprise! It’s Not Yammer!

Answer to SharePoint Adoption: Surprise! It's Not Yammer!

Want SharePoint Adoption?

Get Corporate Communications involved.

If you are familiar with SharePoint, then you are well aware that lack of adoption is an almost universal issue in the community.  Several high-caliber studies indicate adoption rates as low as 22% (and that’s using the measurement of one visit per day!)


As always, in the case of SharePoint, there’s a host of people proposing third-party add-ons to fix this problem. These range from hiding “Easter Eggs” in the portal to screensavers that advertise the intranet. Then there’s Yammer and other “Social” add-ons that “facilitate SharePoint adoption by providing employees something that they are already familiar with.” – CMSWire

Putting a Snack Bar in a Gym

Personally, I love this last one. It’s as if people think that getting someone to go inside the SharePoint environment just to chat and post is anywhere near the same as actually adopting SharePoint. To me, this sounds like putting a snack bar in a gym to drive up membership.

I may be old-fashioned, but work-related collaboration, editing a document or creating a workflow is probably more what senior management had in mind when they signed the check for SharePoint.

Real Adoption Comes from Corporate Communications

If you want real adoption for your intranet you may need to look no further than your company’s own Corporate Communications department.

Corporate Communications departments typically play a key role in how employees, investors and the general public perceive the company.
The core purpose of this department is to communicate:

• – Company Initiatives
• – Announcements of Company News
• – Benefit Information
• – Training Opportunities

Corporate Communication departments routinely advise senior management in the articulation of company goals and the role that each department will play in their attainment. It only makes sense to involve them in an intranet project.

To date, the IT department is still responsible for the implementation and management of the intranet over 70% of the time.  Sadly, it’s IT that finds themselves under pressure when adoption emerges as a serious issue. The answer is simple, take some weight off IT’s shoulders and make sure Corporate Communications takes part in your intranet project early in the process.

Do that and you won’t have to add a snack bar to get people into the gym.