User Adoption in Cloud

There is a drive towards moving to the cloud by all significant solution providers and there are challenges in moving!

As with all other changes – this change relies heavily on the eventual acceptance of a new way of thinking and the control that you have (or do not have) when the solution is in the cloud.

Most enterprise level systems provide a level of management of data capture, functionality and reporting capabilities in their provided services. In many cases this covers a wide range of functions, overwhelming users who perform day to day data capture tasks.

For users who are moving from an on-premise system or legacy (home-grown) application these limitations are (perceived to be) restrictive, not a true restriction. Though if you are in a conversation with the users this is what you will hear!

System Integrators and consultants provide the support and hand-holding needed for an implementation and steer users towards a more seamless and practical method. Allowing the functionalities provided by these solutions – that cover 80% or more – of the normal day-to-day tasks. This is closer to the truth if you are an organization that has chosen to use a cloud-based software for your finance functions.

Most functions in the finance realm tend to be towards invoicing, payments, cash receipts, journals, many cases need to be managed by approvals and controls that enable accuracy and appropriate oversight. If this is the goal for your project and you are implementing the core finance processes – most cloud-based enterprise solutions provide for this.

So what is the defining factor that identifies the success or failure of a project in general? The crucial part is adoption of the new processes and usage of the provided solution to the best of its abilities.

To this end the core responsibility of the project team – both the system integrator and the customer program owner – must be to enable ease in adopting this new way of working. The most effective way to ensure this is to be able to provide extensive training and documentation to support the effort.

Unfortunately, these are the two deliverables / tasks on any project that gets the axe if there is a resource, budget or time constraint! Most system integrators should provide user training, documentation and testing mechanisms to ensure a successful project completion. This leads to sub-optimal usage and users reverting back to manual processes to perform their day to day tasks, leading to an unsuccessful implementation overall and a negative ROI.

Look forward to another follow-up article to identify how this can be achieved without having to break the bank or your back.