Help Employees Get Going Fast: GoodData Increases User Adoption of BI Tools

4 of 5: After learning how GoodData impacts IT, increases productivity, and delivers more visibility into business performance, let’s explore exactly why and how GoodData user adoption rocks compared with other BI solutions.

“User adoption is the key success criteria for any business intelligence project,” says BI veteran Ian Nicholson. “If your users USE it and get value from it, you have succeeded. If they stop using your shiny new reporting system and creep back to using Excel spreadsheets, then you have a real problem.”

Forbes recently stated, “The time has come for BI to break out of its staid normalcy – vendors like GoodData with their cloud-first approach will help that to occur.”

How does GoodData improve user adoption?

In a recent report, Assessing the Benefits of GoodData, Nucleus Research stated that as a result of implementing GoodData’s cloud-based analytics solution, users quickly adjusted to the new business intelligence platform, readily creating their own reports and analysis with little or no intervention from IT.

Three main reasons for rapid user adoption were offered by happy customers:

1. No Tech Skills Required

“We wanted a solution that did not require the user to know SQL or reporting query languages. To make the data part of the decision making process and get more users on board. GoodData allowed us to do that.”

2. Ease of Use, Fast Results

“Our clients are excited about how easy (GoodData) is to use, and how fast the dashboards and reports execute. (Before GoodData), when we first released BI to our clients, we had a very slow adoption rate. Reports were difficult to work with and we had many customization requests from our user community. Now with GoodData, our adoption rate has jumped 50 percent in less than two months, and we expect to be at 90 percent adoption shortly. ”

3. Power, Speed, Desired Functionality

“We were seeing a very low adoption of our previous platform, and it didn’t generate the positive vibe with our customers as it was more difficult to use and the performance was not fast enough. GoodData gave us all the power we needed, as well as the features, speed, and functionality our clients were looking for. Our adoption rate has gone through the roof.”

Advice from the inside

GoodData also provides extensive documentation on how to improve your company’s interaction with our cloud-based, on-demand business intelligence. One favorite bit of direction is to have fun creating tools that users will LOVE to fall in love with ﹘ like dashboards that really engage your users.

Design Better Dashboards: 5 Ways to Make Dashboards Stick
Check out Will Kotterman’s detailed advice about how to design a dashboard that engages users and helps them to actively adopt the solution:

1. Make the dashboard a part of a routine.
2. Use headline reports at the top of a dashboard .
3. Start with broader information and allow users to explore.
4. Promote competition.
5. Send metric-driven notifications to users to keep them engaged.

Another helpful batch of advice is in this GoodData webinar which covers how to approach your BI product implementation with a strategic go-to-market plan when creating Powered by GoodData solutions.

Big Money: Proven Strategies For Your Embedded Analytics Launch
Experts discuss taking an analytics product to market and teach you how to gain competitive advantage, build a comprehensive plan that avoids common mistakes, and monetize your data. Learn how to plan beyond the technical for a successful analytics launch with these five proven strategies:

1. Know how BI will fit in with the existing product.
2. Know who the users are.
3. Define the sales roll-out strategy.
4. Put support processes in place.
5. Anticipate legal and contract scenarios.

Note: Kevin Smith of NextWave Performance and GoodData’s Cory Vander Jagt recently put out a slide deck on how to design an effective end-to-end program from a partnership perspective and increase user adoption from the moment your analytics solution launches.