Corporate sustainability management is more than just a one-time initiative to enhance a company's brand with consumers, shareholders, and employees. Sustainability is critical to an organization's long-term success because if done effectively, corporate sustainably management can help capture, manage and reduce the environmental footprint across global operations and drive greater efficiency and sustainable best practices across the organization.
In an effort to realize these benefits, business leaders are looking to enterprise software solutions, such as CA ecoGovernance, to address some of the most challenging areas including: data management, decision making, stakeholder engagement and organizational change. A solution like CA ecoGovernance can help you to better understand energy, carbon, water, and waste consumption by providing one system of record to accurately measure, report, and analyze consumption in order to reduce energy costs, leverage assets and power capacity smarter, and improve overall energy efficiency.
But, selecting and implementing a solution is only the first step in achieving your sustainability goals and realizing a return on your technology investment. Full adoption of an application among staff and supply chain partners, is just as critical as choosing the right application. So it should be concerning that research from Meta Group found that 76% of employees have a failing or sub-standard knowledge of new system software.
If you're relying on CA ecoGovernance to benchmark facilities, pursue ISO 50,001 certification, perform measurement and verification, manage energy consumption and ultimately save energy costs and demonstrate ROI, can you afford to have 76% of the users to have sub-standard to failing knowledge of the applications features and functionality? Just as the sustainability initiatives you deploy lead to non-trivial return; adoption of an application can directly impact an organization's bottom line in the form of improved user productivity, lowered TCO and greater ROI.
To this end, user adoption should not be approached as an isolated, one-time training event but rather an integrated and iterative process that connects business process documents, test scripts, user documentation and help that delivers the right enablement format, at the right time.
3 Best Practices in Managing User Adoption of Sustainability applications:
1. Synchronize content development throughout the project lifecycle from blueprinting/design/testing to go-live and maintenance/support
By synchronizing content development such that the outputs generated for one purpose (test scripts) can be automatically re-purposed and are able to be modified for other documentation (or user guides, or help files, etc.), organizations can save time, money, and provide for a richer, more comprehensive user experience.
2. Develop multiple learning methods to meet learning needs of a vast user community.
We all learn differently. That's why you should offer.....
- A 'visual' of the business process or step-by-step transaction
- An opportunity to 'interact' or try the business process or step-by-step transaction
- A printed job ad of the business transaction
- An environment to 'test' users and measure organizational readiness
- A just-in-time performance support system delivering context-sensitive help to walk users through a process
- Instructor and user manuals for classroom training
3. Use help menu or in-application support to provide just-in-time, self-services support and information, after formal training has concluded
When a new application goes live, it is often accompanies with an influx of help desk calls for support and "how to" questions. When you consider that according to Gartner, end users contact with the IT service desk cost the IT organization, on average, $20.012 per call, it is clear that minimizing call volumes will not only increase the ROI on the application, but also ensure that users remain productive.
CA Productivity Accelerator provides a single, synchronized source for storing information about CA ecoGovernance and offers the opportunity to follow all of the Best Practices of user Adoption mentioned above. The platform contains core content for training and support, multiple classroom-based and web-based delivery mechanisms and an easy-to-use editing tool to customize content. With materials housed in a single source, organizations can deliver a broad range of implementation, user education and support materials more efficiently and effectively.
To learn more about how CA Productivity Accelerator can help your end users adopt the skills to effectively report on your sustainability efforts with CA ecoGovernance, visit www.ca.com/CAProductivityAccelerator or watch the short video below.