Stats: The SharePoint Adoption Gap

Great study for the IT cynic in many of us. It would have been nice to know directly what % of daily SharePoint users actually like using Sharepoint, but your study pretty much implies that metric is very low. Technology is indeed no panacea for the modern workplace’s many ills.

Thank you for the question! Twenty one percent of people with SharePoint access reported they have no complaints. So 1 in 5 are good to go, as is.

[...] to a survey by uSamp, 80% of users with SharePoint access still chose to e-mail documents to necessary parties instead [...]

[...] to a survey by uSamp, 80% of users with SharePoint access still chose to e-mail documents to needed parties instead of [...]

[...] to a survey by uSamp, 80% of users with SharePoint access still chose to e-mail documents to necessary parties instead [...]

[...] Attachment Ping Pong by Bringing SharePoint into E-Mail According to a survey by uSamp, 80% of users with SharePoint access still chose to e-mail documents to necessary parties instead [...]

[...] Attachment Ping Pong by Bringing SharePoint into E-Mail According to a survey by uSamp, 80% of users with SharePoint access still chose to e-mail documents to necessary parties instead [...]

[...] to a survey by uSamp, 80% of users with SharePoint access still chose to e-mail documents to necessary parties instead [...]

[...] to a survey by uSamp, 80% of users with SharePoint access still chose to e-mail documents to necessary parties instead [...]

That’s pretty ridiculous. It would take the same amount of time to find and provide a link to a document as it would to attach it. Our SP Project module allows users to do this from within Outlook making it even quicker.

http://www.ers.ie/Custom_Software_Development.html

It amazes me how the sharepoint ‘point’ is missing from every company I’ve worked for.

1. How much storage/bandwidth is used for an email with a 1MB attachment, that is shared by 10 people?
2. How many of the 10 then download the attachment to a server which is backed up.
3. How many then print it.

Also MS missed the point. Every company needs retention policies on docs. Stuffing them into a shared space still doesn’t stop me keeping files I don’t need to keep or legally shouldn’t. Then there’s workflow. Everyone wants a document to be sent to recipients who could approve/or reject with reasons. But it has to be an easy thing to set up which integrates with Outlook – contacts. Ownership – imagine if I own a document with a retention policy of 10 years but I leave at year 9. So who owns it now – if I had workflow who would be notified?

The issue is that corporate rules say you need retention policies, tag documents with metadata, but the users don’t care all about this. Bandwidth, storage capacity, policies… not their problem. And let’s not talk about access control. Though I am responsible for out SharePoint implementation I just ran into a situation that I sent a link to a colleague. I gave him access to the site, but to no avail. I needed to give him access to the library. Really annoying. I do it all because I know why. But I can understand that normal business staff really get lost in all this.

It is not what drives them and their salaries. Also, if you once learned a trick to get something done and it works fine for you, why change?

The whole intranet collaboration thing seems to be focused on what it can do – and it can do really cool things no doubt. Adoption isn’t about it what it can do though.

What I see in the resistance from others is that they are already flowing along quite strongly on a path (ie. Emailing attachments to ‘collaborate’).
Email replaced fax and snail mail because it became easier and faster than those options.
Collaborative intra/internet tools will have to do the same thing.

It’s must be possible though – look at the communication, sharing and “collaboration” through Facebook and other social media tools.

From my experiences with the product (admittedly only within a small number of medium to large sized enterprises) I would characterize it as consuming more corporate resources than it returns (through productivity increases,innovation,etc). So I’m in agreement with the theme of the posts above.

I would also suggest that the issue of cultural norms shouldn’t be overlooked. Cultural norms are extremely sticky – and it often catches many deployment leaders by surprise. It took one organization I was involved in almost three years to have Salesforce be embedded into the natural way of doing work… In this case it was critical enough that the high ranks of the organization continued to drive this deployment – they didn’t give, they didn’t fold, they were continually persuasive, but they were definitely caught off guard about how difficult it was to become embedded into the work processes.

It’s really interesting to watch an organization make this transition– after a time, the thing that was initially resisted, found cumbersome, and difficult – comes to define the work itself – and any further changes to it starts the whole cycle again.

Some organizations are more flexible than others though – but that’s another tangent…

Also, maybe there’s a another consideration.

Does SharePoint fail to appeal to the highest levels of the organization? From my previous example, a half-hearted attempt to deploy Salesforce would have resulted in failure. But, in the executive’s eyes, Salesforce had very tangible benefit (their almost real-time view of sales activity was a powerful and real benefit). SharePoint’s benefits, from an executives view, may be perceived as diluted/intangible, as risky – therefore any deployment project would be left to the lower ranks of the organization – leaving the executive to play the role of potential critic or being indifferent about its success. SharePoint though, is one of those products that require a huge push to move the cultural norms. SharePoint might suffer from being in this “no-mans land” between being critical enough to the executive, or being a simple enough addition to current working practices.

It certainly is interesting. I still use email for it is a reflex – create a doc, a sequence of shortcuts and it’s on the way to a colleague next to me. Document managed.
We have our own system to work with information, documents and have a great way to link them to the appropriate task/activity. It is a structured, manageable project-driven environment where information relates to work and time.
But to share a document through that takes some 50 seconds longer and some amount of mental work compared to email. That’s the difference. Order hurts, as some say:)
Will such systems ever compete with regular email in its ease of use? I thought so but now I begin to doubt it – the result to be achieved is not in speed or user friendliness. The goal is to have information as relevant as needed in the right time.

We will have to teach ourselves to think differently about sharing information with others. Email should be demoted to “a short piece of communication not related to anything important”, something like an SMS.

Thank you for weighing in, Ondrej!

Demoting email to serving up “short pieces of communications unrelated to anything important” is a possibility, but not one I see playing out in most organizations.

People are spending some 3-4 hours a day in email, and companies I work with report the vast majority of their client and internal communications are carried out in email. For collaboration and compliance reasons, their priority is getting relevant email correspondence stored on SharePoint, alongside the documents they relate to.
To Tim Smith’s point, many people resist new technology that requires them to learn new ways of working. Hence, a strong commitment from senior management is critical.

Also essential is making IT simple. So rather than serving up another collaboration interface, and asking people to give up the most widely adopted business collaboration tool, what makes the most sense to me is to bring collaboration and social technologies into email.

Thanks to all for sharing good info and talk.
zee
walisystems.com