I had several titles for this post, the Challenge with Connections, the Perception of Social Collaboration, and others could have been used. I imagine lots of my colleagues in the world of trying to bring these tools to organizations could write this and similar posts too. This isn’t a post for admins mind you, although they could fill volumes on the subject as well. This post is about the challenge of adopting Connections.
A widely discussed best practice for adopting Connections is to get your President/CEO/Leader on board and have that person be a shining example for others to follow. Easier said than done. Start slow is how we are coached. Get your CEO’s message into a blog post. It’ll work, you’ll see.
I have no doubt that it would. But what if your CEO has decided that Connections is a solution looking for a problem? What if despite all the hard work you’ve done to share the benefits of the tool falls on deaf ears because they’ve made up their minds in advance? Their perception of the tool leaves you in the dust.
This isn’t new, and in fact it’s in the best practices play book as well, but the place to start is with solving business problems. You have to demonstrate that Connections will solve those challenged. But it has to be a natural solution, nothing forced. Sometimes you just have to be ready for when Opportunity knocks on your door. Sometimes you have to be lucky.
I will be at IBM Connect 2016 in Orlando next week and will be speaking with my colleague Delores Beier from A&W Canada about just how lucky we got in using Connections to solve such a problem. It happened to involve every executive in the company, and more. The result was that we were able to open their eyes to the possibilities of what Connections could do. Some of those executives are now big supporters of the tool and all of them consider the solution wildly successful. And the CEO no longer looks at Connections as a solution looking for a problem.
Our session, 1480: Win, Win, Win: Changing Attitudes, Adopting Social and Going Green – A Customer Solution is Tuesday morning at 8:00 am. We hope to see you there.
I am an IT professional with over 20 years of experience. For much of that time I have worked with IBM Lotus Notes and Domino, helping organizations take full advantage of the tool for building workflow collaboration solutions. I have ITIL certification and a background in project management as well. Recently I have invested in how mobile devices may be used to extend business applications outside the office, and have also been learning how to add social components to traditional business applications. Away from work, I have three daughters and recently celebrated my 20th wedding anniversary with my wife in Hawaii. I coach hockey, cycle, and love growing garlic and then finding new ways to use it. I added a section of herbs to my garden last year and was very happy with the result. I ride my bike each year with my wife in the Ride to Conquer Cancer to raise money for research in childhood cancers, particularly brain tumours. Our youngest daughter lost her battle with a brain tumour in 2008 and through this ride we hope to help find a way to prevent other families from experiencing what we went through and continue to live with. If I have any spare time, I like to travel, so you may see the odd photo from our family adventures here too.
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[…] our users a seamless experience or it wasn’t going to work. I’ve already posted about the challenge we faced with the negative perception of Connections, so for this to work it needed to be easy and intuitive. So our search […]