New software typically enters an organization riding on the promise that it will dramatically improve a key business process. Exhaustively evaluated to ensure it meets the technical and business requirements of the buyer, it is often deployed with great fanfare—an ally for an overworked team that will rely on the software every day to manage crucial projects. But soon thereafter, users often encounter problems using the software or view the software as deficient in key areas. Is the software broken? Does it not deliver where the vendor said it would? Has the buyer been duped? Or has a lack of dynamic user training reduced the promised productivity gains?
It is fair to say that software today has never been more powerful. But app culture and social media have conditioned us to never be satisfied. With data overload and constant interruptions being a daily challenge for today’s workers, users often do not use more than the software’s basic feature set. Research from Microsoft Corp. in 2008 showed that the top five commands in Microsoft Word accounted for 32 percent of all command usage in the application.The top three? Copy, paste, save.
