Today’s guest post is from John Shaw (Senior Director, Adoption Services) of BravoSolution, a leading provider of spend analysis, (e-)sourcing, supplier performance management (SPM) and healthcare sourcing solutions and a sponsor of Sourcing Innovation (SI). It is the second of an eight (8) part series, which, when complete, will form a white-paper that BravoSolution will be releasing to the general populace next Wednesday.
Yesterday’s post (Part I), which noted that rolling out a technology solution isn’t anything like building the “Field of Dreams“, pointed out that just giving the team the tools they need isn’t enough. The leadership team also needs to acquire a set of tools designed to help their team succeed. In short, they need an “adoption toolkit” to make sure the tools are adopted as standard operating procedure.
Today’s post will introduce the concept of High Definition Adoption Measurement (HDAM), but first, it will frame the problem.
E-Sourcing: A commonly complex adoption challenge
For the purposes of this paper, we’ll discuss Adoption Measurement in the context of e-Sourcing simply because so many organizations use an e-sourcing tool to varying levels of success. It serves as an easy-to-identify-with example. Interestingly, the adoption challenges inherent in e-sourcing can be quite complex. We hope this paper will challenge you take an in-depth look at how you apply adoption measurement in your organization, both for e-sourcing and other solutions you use to support your business.
What is High Definition Adoption Measurement?
High Definition Adoption Measurement is a catchy way of saying that we are going to measure and understand how your organization is using a solution. It is a process of understanding your business case and tailoring a set of standard measurements to create visibility into how well the behaviours of your people are supporting your organization’s goals. It includes sharing these metrics with your team, setting collaborative targets and working towards those targets.
Adoption Measurement serves as the basis for prioritizing opportunities for continual improvement and defining solutions for capitalizing upon those opportunities. It essence, it is the Opportunity Assessment and Wave Planning processes of the Adoption Professional!
Setting the Stage: Understand the Business Case
The first step in measuring adoption is to understand why a particular tool is being implemented by an organization. While this may seem both obvious and easy for something like an e-Sourcing tool, I can assure you that one business case does not fit all organizations, no matter how well the benefits of e-Sourcing have been documented. For our discussion, we will highlight 3 organizations that have been modelled after common customer profiles in BravoSolution’s customer base.
Observe that each of these organizations is trying to solve a different problem with the same e-sourcing tool. Although they all may be able to benefit from using e-Sourcing to achieve additional supplier value, increase transparency to the sourcing process and increase team efficiency, they each have their own focus areas.
Part III will describe the typical view of adoption from 30,000 feet and the useful- and useless-ness of such a view.