Cloud based Enterprise Applications: Does it need a new approach to end user adoption?
There has been a significant movement in the development of key enterprise applications (CRM, HCM) on the cloud. With on-demand infrastructure available, the value proposition to move enterprise applications to the cloud is becoming more and more promising. I do not believe this trend is going to slow down, in fact the adoption of SaaS (Sofware As A Service) is only going to see an increase. As we all know, a key value propositions of such applications is decreased “time to market”.
In other words, enterprise software deployed, configured to specific business requirements and made available to end users in a shorter period of time. But in the end, true value (ROI to the business) from any application is realized once there is “meaningful use” of the application by its end users.
In my opinion this does pose a significant challenge for end user adoption. Organizations need to ensure that user population is ready to use the application in a shorter period of time due to shorter implementation cycles. Hence, I think such scenarios would mandate end user adoption strategies to be quite different from current methods applied to traditional ERP implementations, which runs for 12-18 months. The time horizon to create awareness of the change, build the right skills and prepare the users for the new business processes and workflows is relatively short.
Do you believe that a new approach is required for such scenarios leading to “meaningful use” of cloud based applications?
