"ADOPTION" - a tangible measure for success of change management

After spending a good amount of my 15 years in Presales, Solutioning and Transformation functions trying to bring disruptive technologies to see the light of its day, I can vouch most of these projects/technologies turn a success/failure based on human acceptance of these rather than the technology features or the lack of it.

I came through a blog title "What is the Problem? - I don't know, but the solution is Big Data". The Author of this blog attempted to bring to fore the perception of relying on Big Data technologies like MongoDB instead of traditional RDBMS schema for almost every problem even when that was not the right solution. My experience is a little different; there are times most of them know the problem and the solution but isn't properly implemented. Now what drives proper implementation..

This drives a new metric for such technologies [typically SAAS organizations] - ADOPTION. This is nothing but ensuring customers/users actually start using the product. This has also brought a new role in such organizations "Customer Success Managers". Organizations like Salesforce,com, Cisco WebEx have realized this phenomenon probably the earliest and hence made sure that they need a role to ensure customers use this product.  

This role tracks the usage of the customer;   understand the needs of the customer and educates the customer on the features of the product; This role's success is measured by the increase in Adoption of the customers.

Adoption has become a key metric that helps to predict upsell, renewals and monthly recurring revenues. Every interaction of the customer is viewed as an opportunity to understand the customer's behavior by organizations. Most Account Managers have technology at their dispersal to understand their customers. How much of this is used to wow the customer and increase the ADOPTION remains a key tool between the good and great account relationships.