(Jedox topped 12 categories in this year’s BARC Planning Survey. Our new 12-part blog series tells you why “Business Benefits”, “Ease of Use” or “Implementation support” should be on your check list when choosing business software. 8th category: Product Satisfaction)
New Software is Implemented – And No One Uses It
In an earlier post, we noted the high failure rates of many IT implementations. While we listed a number of the factors, one that deserves further elaboration is user adoption.
Far too often a new software solution is implemented and no one uses it. An article on Business In Focus cites several studies that support this case: An AMR Research study showed that nearly 50 percent of companies faced serious challenges with business software changes and user adoption, while a survey of Fortune 500 executives cited “resistance” as the primary reason that changes failed in their organizations. It doesn’t matter how elegantly a new software solution fits into the IT infrastructure if business users don’t want to work with it.
Human Nature Often Resists Change
“You can buy the greatest software in the world, but if your employees don’t use it, you won’t get your money’s worth,” says Alvin Reyes, executive vice president of Mosaic, a training and workforce consulting firm based in Renton, Washington. “People have problems embracing new technology because human nature itself often resists change. Even if you had the best training content in the world, you won’t get employees ready or increase user adoption if the training is developed or deployed in a vacuum.”
But what if a workforce is already trained? Excel remains the most widely used BI and planning product in the world; while many users and companies are dissatisfied with it, they nevertheless are familiar and comfortable with using it.
Empowering Spreadsheet Heroes for High User Adoption
Jedox’s ExcelPLUS leverages those skillsets, speeding and simplifying user adoption for a much more powerful BI tool. By removing Excel’s drawbacks while retaining its advantages, Jedox’s ExcelPLUS transforms the world’s most used reporting and planning tool into the most useful one. Jedox manages data and business rules as well as secures data, and does all this while allowing users to apply their Excel expertise. Business users find Jedox easy to work with because their familiarity with Excel provides an intuitive feel for how it works. They can quickly and easily become a Jedox BI expert, on the Web, smartphone, tablet, and the cloud. The result is a solution that is readily adopted, with users not daunted but satisfied and delighted with the new product performance.
What Users Are Saying about Product Satisfaction
For those involved in business intelligence software selection, among the most important resources are the independent assessments done by the Business Application Research Center (BARC). BARC just released its 2016 Planning Survey, the world’s largest survey of planning software users.
Among those using development-oriented planning solutions (i.e., solutions that allow customers to implement totally individual planning requirements), Jedox ranked number one in terms of product performance, scoring higher than the peer group average (8.9 vs. 4.7) in that sector and higher than their nearest competitor (8.9 vs. 7.4). Here is BARC’s viewpoint on Jedox’s top-ranking performance in this category:
“Jedox customers are satisfied with the vendor as well as their planning and BI tool and are likely to recommend the product to others. The vendor is top ranked for product satisfaction in two of its peer groups and a leader in the other. Problems are seldom encountered with the product. Jedox’s user friendliness and the flexibility it offers to implement various planning and BI use cases on one common platform are key factors influencing product satisfaction.”
(Source: BARC THE Planning Survey 16)
Let’s Make Your Life Easier
“Feedback is positive throughout the organization, because Jedox is easy to handle and use through its intuitiveness.” – Richard S., Head of Controlling, Fiat
To see how Jedox empowers self-service, data-driven modeling while easing user adoption, you can go here; to download the complete summary of Jedox in the BARC study at no cost, go here.
The post If You Build It, Will They Come? (Pt. 8) appeared first on Jedox BI Blog.