Call him “The SharePoint Shrink.”
Rob Bogue, who is well known in the community as “The SharePoint Shepherd” (I’m sure you’ve seen him at industry events with his shepherd’s staff), has decided to take a look at the psychology behind software adoption, with the idea of helping organizations understand why users do or do not use SharePoint when it’s implemented.
“I’d work with organizations to build a platform that looked good, was stable and worked, yet no one used it or cared about it,” he said.
Rob said he wanted to understand why this was happening and what the barriers were. At first, he found that people had trouble with tasks and knowing what to do. But when he looked more deeply, he learned that IT organizations are not trained to understand the business value that helps create change.
With a new DVD series called “The Psychology of SharePoint Adoption and Engagement,” Bogue crystallizes the things organizations need to know to get people engaged. “You don’t really want adoption; that’s passive. You want engagement. Are you building solutions on the platform? Are you billing on it, or delivering product on it? If so, then adoption comes naturally because users are engaged with it.”
He also tackles some fuzzy issues, such as trust and measuring success. “We all believe we know what trust is, but if I ask you right now what is trust, you don’t have an answer,” he said. “When pushed, people will start to define trustworthy, but not trust.”
This shows, he said, that there are a lot of dynamics at play under the tent of change, and in the steps necessary to facilitate that change.
The DVD, which runs two hours and 21 minutes, is the first in a series he’ll be doing with other experts in the community. The next topics he plans to tackle are information architecture and search. The cost is US$299, but he’s discounting it to $249 until the end of the month, so as they say on late-night TV, “act now.”
—David
