You have highlighted a very common problem but one that usually slips through the cracks when the CXOs get together to pick a solution. In one of my previous companies, management made a unilateral decision to build an ECM solution in-house but did not consider user buy-in or suitability to the kind of real-world workflow for content contribution. As a result, the solution failed because content contributors were not able to use the new solution without (effectively) re-engineering their lives.

Company culture (which would be covered under user buy-in) is an intangible, but an important aspect of tool choice, and in my experience understanding the culture has been key to the biggest success stories of ECM adoption.

Very nice post and right on the money. Most CMS solutions fail (not from an implementation perspective but from TCO) because of lack of user buy-in.

It is natural that most users will have some resistance to change. Ease of use should be considered as an important factor along with restructuring the business process to make it easy for end users to adapt to the system.

Keep on shining the light.

-Manas

Before taking Users buy-in you will need to throw the product to the user community to play around with it and experience it. Product vendors should provide a “play area” to a prospective organization so that the users can evaluate the product from their perspective and participate actively in the product selection thus ensuring the success of the implementation.

Unfortunately I have not seen any product vendors who have adapted to this. Hopefully this is going to change and people can evaluate a product (from all perspectives) easily without going through the painful steps of complex installations