Chapter 12. User Adoption

This chapter will cover the most important step to a successful implementation, that is, user adoption. In the movie The Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner's character continued to see the aberration of a baseball player who would say, "If you build it, they will come". The reality is, that may only be true in the movies. Adapting a new technology is really quite simple, but that is only until the users get involved. If only we could build out our perfect Cognos BI environment like the one that we see in all of the demos, magically all of the users would flock to it. Unfortunately, in reality, user adoption is never that simple. Unlike technology, there is no manual or guide to user adoption. Most of us work in an environment where IT and business are quite separate. In these types of environments, there is a huge disconnect. This can manifest itself as simple issues such as who pays for this technology?, or more complex issues such as who owns this technology and who...