The Most Overlooked Construct for Successful Collaboration Adoption

Change Management Challenges

Harvard Business Review, published an article by Ron Ashkenas titled, “Change Management Needs to Change.”  He begins the article:

“As a recognized discipline, change management has been in existence for over half a century. Yet despite the huge investment that companies have made in tools, training, and thousands of books (over 83,000 on Amazon), most studies still show a 60-70% failure rate for organizational change projects — a statistic that has stayed constant from the 1970′s to the present.”

 

When I began researching change management, these statistics astounded me.  Year after year, countless studies cite the inadequacies of change management programs.  Specific to technology programs, the statistics are the same, if not worse: a McKinsey and Company study in 2012 stated, “On average, large IT projects run 45 percent over budget and 7 percent over time, while delivering 56 percent less value than predicted.”  Technology even has its own nomenclature for unsuccessful implementations: Shelfware. 

 

Enter collaboration tools.  Logically, the reasons to implement the tools are endless.  (To quote Fred Cavazza’s Forbes Article: “Once revolutionary, Email and Microsoft Office are today’s white-collar workers’ curse.” “…working habits based on individualism are amplifying the waste of time and energy.)  Nonetheless, I could cite many articles and studies describing unsuccessful or underused collaboration tools and platforms.   So though many agree on the need, most are still not implementing the tools; implement them without support; or, use the traditional, ineffective, (expensive) change management tools.  So what does it take?

 

 “Confusion is the last stop on the way to Clarity.” Alan Cohen

 

Change management and corporate cultures have focused mostly on extrinsic motivations and myopic rationale to influence change.  These methods were successful when job functions were systematic and easily defined.  Unfortunately, as job functions evolved, tools and messaging to illicit change have not.  Advancements in neuroscience and behavioral psychology have shown that our choices are not based on rationale alone.  Successful change is realized when we address both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. Intrinsic motivators are now arguably the more important stimuli for successful change. (See Daniel Pink’s book “Drive”, or Chip and Dan Heath’s book, “Switch”.  All of whom reference Nobel prize winning, Daniel Kahneman, in his work,“Thinking Fast and Slow”.)  Even the Technology Acceptance Model’s (UTAUT, TAM2, TAM3) have included more intrinsic psychological constructs to each theory.

 

This table summarizes six of the most referenced, influential factors contributing to a successful collaboration software implementation.  However, very few programs reference them all; and, guess which construct is the least used?

 

 

If you guessed, “The Proof,” you are correct! 

In a KPMG Global IT Project Management Survey of 600 organizations, they stated, “Many organizations fail to measure benefits so they are unaware of their true status in terms of benefits realization.”  When it comes to the nascent Enterprise 2.0 platforms, some posit that there is no way to measure the impact.  Carrie Basham Young stated in her CMS article, “there is no way to actually capture this value in a true numerical sense, especially not from the analytics that are made available to you inside your enterprise social network dashboard.”  I agree the native dashboards do not quantify value – they are only designed to show types of usage.   However, I completely disagree that the benefits are unable to be quantified.   And I fear Young’s position is shared by many regarding a variety of collaboration tools – either because they do not know how to quantify the value; and/or, they have not mapped the tools to existing business goals.

 

The M4 Adoption Program is designed to realize the benefits from collaboration tools and platforms.  The strategy includes the above six constructs: executive sponsorship, corporate culture, facilitating conditions, WIIFM, effort expectancy, and of course Business Relevance.  It is imperative to address both the intrinsic and extrinsic influences to promote effective adoption of collaboration tools; and, to map them to business goals (realized or latent) with appropriate measurements.