End User Adoption

JohnC · ‎03-07-2022

Introduction

Before we even start defining what end user adoption is and creating a checklist of important goals you need to achieve with end users, there are two main concepts that really deserve attention:

End user adoption is not about leading users from point A to point B within Incorta. Adoption of users means bringing users from point A (when the user experiences a specific pain point) to point B, showing them how Incorta will help them improve their business questions with exploring data and building dashboards that can influence decisions.
Adoption occurs way before users get in touch with Incorta and very often even before they actually start using Incorta. You start adopting users from the very first touchpoint with Incorta. The very fact that everyday business users who want questions answered can navigate Incorta, hence adoption process has already provided the user with a positive outlook to do their job function more efficiently. Incorta empowers the business and removes siloed management.

Adoption starts with educational content, promotional messages, content curation, and technical activities and continues way beyond the point at which the user is familiar with Incorta.

What you need to know before reading this article

We recommend that you be familiar with these Incorta resources before exploring this topic further.

Let’s Go

Incorta has many channels that support this process. For example:

The free Incorta learning platform
The Incorta community
The Incorta cloud free trial platform
The Incorta web-based question and answer portal
Incorta and partner webinars

The user needs to fully understand what Incorta is designed for, what goals they can achieve with it, and what benefits Incorta presents. Users need to understand that Incorta’s Direct Data Mapping Platform ® is unique and why it is worth investing time in testing and exploring it. You should take full control over the initial steps that the users take in Incorta to make sure that users can immediately set up the environment and achieve some quick wins.

The Old vs the New

The traditional business intelligence process has been around since the early 1970’s. Information technology departments employ specialist data engineers, data scientists, data developers, business analysts, system functional experts (e.g. SAP, Oracle EBS, NetSuite and others), that support this process which are costly and require extensive knowledge transfer to understand the data repositories of organizations. A data engineer can sometimes take up to six months to onboard.

The Incorta solution removes the lengthy and costly processes of the extract, transform, load (ETL), the building of data schemas and then storing data in enterprise data warehouse (EDW) tools. This is a paradigm shift in thinking and will need concise messaging to provide end user adoption and positioning of Incorta.

Identifying the Incorta Champion

Keep in mind as you learn about users that you should not focus on only the “best” or most experienced users. Someone who is considered an expert on Incorta may not be an expert on all parts of Incorta and/or the business. It is much more likely that an individual will leverage only key areas of the product over and over while ignoring other parts. You should consider a range of users to ensure that Incorta works for most of the end user population which is spread by function and/or vertical industry and dispersed geographically.

The technical champion should have the following attributes: (To name but a few)

Embraces change
Focused on collaboration
Highly engaged with IT, business, and company wide end users
Interested in adopting new ways of working
Supportive of knowledge transfer

Supporting the Incorta Champion

Incorta as a disruptor in the data analytics sector, are in a unique position to support the Incorta Champion. This should include: (To name but a few)

Provide updated content on Incorta’s various communication channels
Fast and reliable end user change request/support resolution
Acknowledgment of end user improvement and achievements
Access to subject matter experts within Incorta
Promote Incorta’s system improvements identified by the Technical Champion

Employee Job Performance

Now that Incorta has been effectively deployed within an organization, system management and end employee job performance metrics will need to be revisited as almost all measurements will improve.

New Value/Over time activity cost analysis

Now that Incorta is embedded into the fabric of the data analytics user base, there will be a need to do some new activity costs measurements to identify the new improved job metrics. For example:

Today's landscape:

To generate one report for a telecoms company that provides the quarterly revenue per product line. This activity will literally start as soon as the previous quarter results have been published. So you would have a team of BI specialists start gathering the data for this one unique report.

THEN THE CAVEAT

The "bricks and mortar" stores have just implemented a new point of sale (POS) system and the IT department were not involved in the procurement process. So now you will have all hands-on deck to first understand what data is stored, how it is stored, where it's stored and what format it's in. This process could take six weeks or more to analyze and provide reports to the management team responsible for the various product lines.

So, let’s look at the employee value/over time for this instance.

Employee head count: (The old way of BI)

Resources Required	Time Required
2 x data analysts	2 weeks (est)
2 x EDW analysts	1 to 2 weeks (est)
2 x BI Developers	3 weeks (est)
1 x Vendor expert (New POS system)	4 weeks (est)

New Incorta BI landscape: (The new way of BI)

Resources Required	Time Required
1 x Incorta business user	1 day

So there you have it. End user adoption in a nutshell!