It still comes down to user adoption

Recently our business process management group (OpenText Global 360) released a survey of SharePoint adoption. It's actually the third in a series and so some very interesting and clear trends have emerged (see the SlideShare presentation below). It's worth a look whether you use SharePoint or not, as the results are very similar for other ECM systems.

The importance of business process management solutions to add to many of these SharePoint sites is documented (slide 29).

But what caught my eye are the results of the `What are the challenges question - the largest single challenge is user adoption (slide 16; 25% of respondents) closely followed by strategy (16%), and yet 44% of respondents have no training program! It should come as no surprise then that 63% describe the user experience as only `Somewhat adequate - requires in-house redesign` (slide 25). To me that sounds like a technologists response - if users are having trouble, then redesign the interface rather than training them! That said, most respondents describe their systems as being in the early stages of maturation (slide 49), although I suspect they believe that maturity will come with customization not user training or strategy.

ECM veterans will not be surprised by this - it is true of most implementations, irrespective of the underlying software. But one does wonder why we never seem to learn.

Fall 2011 SharePoint Survey Results

View more presentations from OpenText Global 360

You can read more on the finding of this survey here