By Greg Lush

As you may have read in my last post, the most challenging part of making it through the adoption cycle of a new digital tool is pushing through the trough of disillusionment. Creating the proper digital dependencies, in the right order, is hyper-critical for you to achieve the goal of goal of attaining an outstanding digital reputation. Our objective is to select one or two areas within the business which we can apply one of the valuable applications. To pull this off, the applications chosen must touch many parts of the business and the processes should be considered as compulsory. Here are some things to consider:

1. Finding that one or two critical business processes which can naturally tie to one of your valuable applications is simpler than it sounds. If you are not already familiar with the details of your business, then partner with somebody who is within your organization.
2. Think about the user’s current habits, your suggested first application needs to be close to the spirit of the existing process. Straying too far will force the user to think about things completely different, and while that is not always a bad thing, the first hiccup they experience will find them quickly using their old ways.
3. Your suggestion should simplify their lives. Please don’t misinterpret this as make the activity faster. It is hard to gauge the efficiency gains until after the individual has fully resolved, and used for a period of time, the new digital process. Without question, your designs should always focus on simplification.
4. Answer this question: What does every person need? For instance, in the service business people need to get purchase order numbers, or on the sales side of the equation they require quote numbers. Introducing these very narrow opportunities to your community will raise their comfort level by accessing the new environments daily, increasing their confidence.

Let’s not forget that adoption is 80 percent resolve. It will be important that you baseline the starting point and set goals for you to reach directly related to adoption. Please do not let your head get too big as the adoption numbers will rise quickly if you have adequately chosen a good digital dependency. Please remember that we are trying to build a solid digital reputation. Make sure that you share the good news of the adoption to the users and the leadership in a tasteful and non-boastful manner. Of course, you yourself are also prone to bringing back old habits. Let’s use the example of notifying people regarding their progress towards adoption goals. For example, four weeks have gone by since you first deployed your two digital dependencies. So far so good, you had a few hiccups at the beginning but all in all things seem to be running quite smoothly. It’s time to let others share in the good news, what do you do?

• Send an email to the leadership team advising them of the adoption metrics?
• Use a collaborative news object from within the cloud platforms valuable applications.
• Create the news object, and it's appropriate notifications from within the cloud platform, yet also send a courtesy link via email to the leadership team.

Which would you choose consciously? Most likely, since you are reading this book, your choice will be item number three. Let me share with you, from personal experience, that at the beginning you will choose number one. If you come from the IT side, and not generally from the business, odds are you will choose item number two. The correct answer will be your conscious decision to select item number three. One of the worst things you can do is make the new platform appear as a burden or even worse an area of embarrassment for the leadership team. Depending upon the individuals they may or may not come to you for assistance in accessing the recently released news object. It is critical that we keep our eye on the ball and always remember why this first step is so important, we are building a digital reputation which is made up of trust. Don’t permit your ego or unrealistic expectations of the users to get you going down the wrong path.