Business Buzzwords: User Enablement

A workforce will not spontaneously embrace new software. If you're waiting for that, you're either bleeding money on licensing that's probably jumping another 10% next year, or you're simply creating a jumble of uncoordinated, parallel processes as your early adopters surge ahead. Either way you're hardly maximizing the ROI on what is undoubtedly a substantial investment. Ouch.

As a recent lead on a M365 implementation project, I discovered the term "User Enablement". User enablement has the goal of maximizing adoption and building confidence in a new software. It describes the process of explicitly showing the application of new tools to daily work. Without diligent user enablement, new software, no matter how good, simply won't be used to its full potential.

Wordy definitions aside, I've found that in the wild, user enablement really boils down to these five things:

1. Understanding the current business processes, intimately.

2. Finding best practices that use new features to improve workflows for individual functions.

3. Explicitly showing employees how the software works in their personal world.

4. Holding users accountable for building new habits and becoming efficient with the new process.

5. Receiving feedback and adjusting the process after user error is eliminated.

Sounds easy, right? Not quite. Change inherently brings the discomfort of mistakes and a guaranteed period of unproductivity as you fumble through new processes. It's easy to get discouraged when tasks take longer than before. Deeper still, factors like status quo bias, loss aversion, fear of the unknown, habit, and cognitive dissonance fuels resistance. However, user enablement strives to encourage adoption despite all of these psychological headwinds.

Full disclosure, I am not an IT professional, far from it. In fact, I usually stumble through a password reset with an accompanying a cascade of annoying system alerts and a sudden, desperate urge to call IT for help (and yes, Brenda, I've restarted my machine). In fact, I think it is because I am not formally trained in computer science, I have an advantage when it comes to providing user enablement and increasing adoption.

In the end, I like this buzzword: "User Enablement". Discovering it felt like finally putting a name to a crucial, often overlooked gap – that space where the software provider's responsibility ends and the user's workflow begins. It perfectly describes the need to bridge the divide between a tool's features and how individuals actually get their work done.