The adoption of technology somehow STILL confuses many managers

One of the biggest shifts in work in the past 20 years has been the need for some plan around adoption of technology. Time was that IT were the weird dudes in the corner you only talked to about resetting passwords and whatnot. Now IT drives a lot of business, and there are so, so many vocabulary issues around that, I could write a book. IT tends to think in terms of “sprints” and “scrums” and “stand-ups” and “backlogs” and “bugs,” and most other departments don’t use these words — but when they have an issue, they need to know what these words mean or that issue ain’t getting fixed.

That was a bit of a tangent, because what I want to discuss is adoption of technology and how to do it effectively. First, a quick story. Last place I worked wanted to shift over to Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Nothing wrong with that; ’tis a good product. They also wanted to have the discussions about shifting over at the highest levels. Again, nothing specifically wrong with that — the highest levels need to approve big spends. (That’s a good chunk of what they do, in fact.) Dynamics gets bought. If you are familiar with how all this works, it means you gotta take Yammer too. Yammer is owned by Microsoft nowadays.

So we start getting emails about Yammer. The first one says it’s “Facebook for work.” (It’s not.) The second one says…