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 third 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 II) introduced us to High Definition Adoption Measurement (HDAM) and framed the solution in the context of e-Sourcing, which presents a common complex adoption challenge.

 

Today’s post addresses the typical view from 30,000 feet and how it leaves something to be desired.

Adoption from 30,000 Feet:

The report below highlights what appears to be a very successful Go-Live followed by a year of continual growth of system usage. This is the 30,000-foot view and it should answer some very fundamental questions like:

• “Have we trained everyone?“
• “How many of our Souring Events are going through the system?“
• “Is usage increasing according to plan?“

These 30,000-foot views are useful. The report could apply to any of our three (3) companies and might be presented at an executive level as evidence of a successful first year of rollout. In this example, it seems our companies are generally moving in the right direction. If we saw problems at this level, we could easily identify the low hanging adoption fruit to pursue.

But if we reflect back upon the business case of each of our example companies, this view does not really tell us much on how any of them are progressing in increasing supplier value, maintaining transparency or increasing efficiency.

Take the following “unknown issues” common in e-Sourcing organizations. Each issue is counter-productive to the organization’s goals, but is not evident on the report:

These examples are the tip of the iceberg. They illustrate how users can appear at a 30,000-foot level to be using a system correctly but also how that 30,000-foot view can be deceptive. When this occurs to your organization, the results are simple. Your organization isn’t realizing the full ROI that you set out to achieve and the Adoption Team doesn’t have visibility into the problems they need to fix.

Part IV will provide an example case study that describes some of the adoption challenges at a global manufacturer.