Discovering Zoho about a year ago, I’ve become a fan of not just their applications (politely written off  by a Microsoft exec last year as fake office), but also how hyper-focused they are on their customers and partnerships.  Unlike Google, they realize that the best avenue for success for them is delivery quality applications that integrate well amongst themselves and with the various market leaders as defined by their userbase.  And, you won’t find very many “Beta” labels slapped on apps as an excuse for subpar experiences.  In short, this is what you get when you’re a company that needs to meet payroll based on your product, rather than a quasi-Trojan Horse for capturing user data for your search engine.

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This is a continuation of the article Deploying software is easy, but realizing value can be hard.  Why technology adoption matters.

In this article, I’m going to focus on the 3nd and largest segment.  The Enterprise.  When you think about the technologies your company is using right now, the ones that ‘help keep the lights on’ financially, what are the top 5?  You should know this, because everything else is supplemental, and your budget should reflect that.  In fact, the battle that rages on the desktop right now between Microsoft, Google, Cisco,  and a few others is predicated on each company’s belief that their technology addresses the productivity and ROI needs better than their competitors.  In fact, it’s not uncommon for organizations to use products from several of these companies, cherry-picking the optimal basket of solutions to meet their needs.  But I go back to my original question: when you begin to evaluate each investment and solution, which are the ones that are absolutely needed and which are kept around for political, IT stagnation, cost/complexity to migrate or other reasons?

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This is a continuation of the article Deploying software is easy, but realizing value can be hard.  Why technology adoption matters.

In an organization, there exists 3 core segments that IT and technology partners focus on and interact: Individuals, Workgroups and the Enterprise itself. Obviously the dynamics of a company can take a wall full of whiteboards to properly describe, but for the sake of brevity let’s agree that they would fit into one of the aforementioned segments. 

In Part 1, I described the nucleus of any technology adoption as involving the deployment of that technology.  Think of deployment as the nucleus of a technology orb, ok?  As such, when put into motion, the more complete that nucleus is, the truer the forward progress of that orb.  Taking the analogy slightly further, the adoption that is solidly based on deployment is less likely to be swayed off track by the typical obstacles in its path or wind of change.  As I shared before, the symbiotic relationship between deployment and adoption sometimes necessitates small-scale or targeted adoption as the precursor to broader deployment.  Let’s look at how adoption can be affected in each, starting with individuals or end users:

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