This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: New blog articles in Microsoft Tech Community.
This article is the first in a series exploring the benefits of the Microsoft Service Adoption framework for Government Community Clouds. Does technical competency matter when driving adoption?
“Technical competence refers to the ability to have the depth of knowledge required to apply specific technology to a business problem to achieve a desired outcome. Without understanding what you can do, how you can do it and the cost of changes you will not be able to judiciously apply technology in your organization.”
This (above) is one of my favorite lessons from the course! Why? Because in the Government Community Clouds, technical capabilities and features are different from commercial and different from each other – for example, in Teams. Knowing the technology and understanding the differences are required to “judiciously apply technology” in our field. We must understand what’s possible in GCC/GGH/DoD to plan and set expectations accordingly; otherwise, we’ll frustrate our end-users and lose credibility with our IT Professionals.
At Ignite’s Introduction to Microsoft Teams for government with a “ask me anything” session, Rima Reyes (Senior Program Manager, Teams Engineering) and Sankalp Jain (Product Marketing Manager, Teams) shared a “Top Reasons Teams Deployments Succeed” list. The truth from the trenches of “Training was performed out of their [GCC/GGH/DoD] environment (not commercial)” is grounded on the lesson above. Go to ~28:40 mark to hear what they said.
Behavior change (adoption) is often about removing technical difficulties (blockers). Take a moment to listen to FREAKONOMICS Radio’s How to Launch a Behavior-Change Revolution. Key points for me starts at ~27:40 mark or Ctrl + F “By just making it easier” and read what Kahneman said. Making it easy for end-users (by identifying and removing blockers) requires technical competence.
PS: for context, I work as a full-time Service Adoption Specialist in the field (National Security, Civilian, and DoD organizations) focused on Teams, leading some of the largest and fastest adopted Teams deployments in the world. If your experience differs, I’d love to hear about it and learn from it! Thanks in advance.