I want to relate adoption back to business platforms and anchor it in the process.
Today business platform adoption is a struggle. It needs a clear revisiting of the theory of diffusion and adoption to extract the relevant points of necessary practice.
What is vitally needed is the recognition that deciding on adopting a business platform approach has five stages or decision points to go through.
So often, platform providers automatically go to the assumption that their platform will be adopted. It simply will not without working through and gaining confirmation the five stages of adoption are clarified.
The five stages for business platform adoption decision.
Each of these needs a definitive engagement process by the business platform provider. Passing through the five stages of adoption needs relevance, identification and building out the relationship to pass through all these as distinct cascading steps.
Awareness and Knowledge – refer to a customer’s acknowledgement of the presence or existence of the new business platform and where they form a general perception of what it might entail. The intersection of need recognition often drives it through consistent education and marketing communications to show client value, not the platform provider’s prowess. This is the point of being inspired to find out more.
Persuasion and Interest – this occurs when a client processes the available information associated with the platform and considers the product or service’s appeal on this and its relevant value or potential to them Here, the client actively seeks out information and details and begins engagement. The critical point for any platform provider to manage well.
Decision and Assessment – Considering the persuasion factors, the client will decide whether to adopt, delay any decision, or reject the platform. Their activity in seeking advice, gathering data and comparing or making different assessments happen clearly here and need the contacted platform provider to understand the level of assessment and the issues. Here, costs begin to kick in, considering the switching costs and fresh investment needs and weighing the advantages. This is the hardest stage to understand. The ability to build a solid business case at this point is essential. My recent post, “Exploring points of value in adopting business platforms,” has some relevancy here.
Implementation and Exploration – These are the series of activities to put the platform to use in exploring its (multiple) points of value and validating these. The client employs the platform to a varying learning degree. The usefulness, impacts, and costs are determined, and they may search for further support or relevance value about it. Here the business platform provider needs to be really “on the case” in strengthening the engagement and anchoring it into more of a forward-looking partnership but working in parallel on this learning path, as adoption is a gradual journey.
Confirmation and Adoption– is mostly concerned with post-adoption behaviour exhibited by the adopter, reinforced by the platform’s actual delivery against the relative advantage ‘claims,’ its complexity and compatibility on their understandings. The individual finalizes their decision to continue using it and makes that ultimate investment in forming an ongoing, long-term partnership for extending its use to its full potential.
Develop this five stages process of engagement in any adoption of business platforms
Suppose these five stages are not followed in the business platform adoption process; there is a higher probability of poor engagement, lost time in chasing leads, being distracted, and not getting the end result intended or stated or being the offering of compelling value believed as the stages of adoption were not followed and anchored in these transition points of understanding.
So I would always recommend understanding the theory of diffusion and adoption offered by Everitt Rogers in his Diffusion and Adoption theories for innovation ; it is as relevant for Business Platform adoption today as when he offered this for “straightforward” innovation.
Platforms are the new meeting place for innovation to happen. They diffuse and adopt as their key value but getting clients to think this through needs these five decision stages
