During my adoption workshop at SharePoint Fest Chicago, I’ll be discussing the importance of building user-centric adoption campaigns. Traditional approaches to user adoption (e.g. mass email communications without personalized messaging, antiquated “train the trainer” models and old-school documentation that focuses on features instead of business needs) simply don’t work for today’s users. These one-size-fits-all models assume all users want the same tools, have the same needs and will respond to the same stimuli. Traditional adoption models also widen the gap between the business and IT, alienating the very users IT is trying to attract.

Today’s SharePoint and Office 365 adoption campaigns need a strong user-centric approach. User-centric programs leverage personas and relationships to highlight differences between business roles and focus on leveraging technology to achieve business outcomes. In a user-centric model, you spend time building relationships with innovative and influential users and teams across your business. If you can help these key users/teams build successful business outcomes using SharePoint and Office 365, you’ll amass effective use cases and convert key influencers into collaboration evangelists.  And if you choose your business users wisely, they’ll influence others to engage, driving adoption of your technologies in order to achieve stronger business outcomes.