Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Promoting engagement = removing barriers to engagement

As a frequent if not prolific user of IT, I can fail to appreciate the barriers that others who use IT less than I do face when challenged to do so. One of these is IT skills, another is inclination, another may be 'professional identity'. A friend told me how Microsoft managed to swing their market share from IBM lotus spreadsheets to Excel through identifying and eradicating every last thing about their software which prevented users migrating. This can only happen by talking to the users. The other method of requiring people to use IT to accomplish tasks and activities, but it's hard to really win people like that.