Somebody reports an adoption figure to your steering committee. Does anyone in the room know what its denominator is?
Every adoption percentage carries one, and it is usually chosen by accident.
Does the population include everyone with an account, everyone holding the role, or only those who received eligible work in the period? Are people on leave included? Temporary staff? New joiners in their first fortnight? Employees whose responsibilities changed after the account was created?
These are not administrative details. A department can appear to have poor adoption because half its members had no eligible cases that month. Another can appear excellent because dormant accounts were cleaned up shortly before the reporting date.
That matters because the adoption figure is frequently the only evidence a steering committee ever sees. It closes the item, the programme moves on, and the organisation spends the next two years believing something that was never established.
Implementation programmes routinely create accounts broadly and early, before roles are confirmed, which loads the denominator with people who never needed the system at all.
There is a working instrument for defining adoption as behaviour rather than access in Built to Be Used.
#DataQuality #UserAdoption #ITimplementation
This article accompanies the book Built to Be Used.