As any seasoned Information Management professional knows, you can provide great tools, extensive documentation, in-depth training, and a sound rationale for compliance, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the masses will greet any new process or workflow with optimism and openness. No matter the downstream benefits or promises of future productivity, end users are naturally resistant to change and disruption of their routines, in part because the average knowledge worker is now using 11 different applications compared to only six in 2019.
Given this reality, it’s better to meet end users where they’re at rather than force them to someplace new while minimizing any additional steps any new Information Management initiative requires. Remember, every extra click required creates one more off-ramp from the workflow and the freelancing behavior that might follow.
harmon.ie is a great example of an Information Management solution that adds value and functionality while improving the end-user experience. harmon.ie takes a somewhat clunky workflow for adding files and emails to Teams by letting end users handle everything all from within Outlook.
They’re already in Outlook most of the day, so now end users can simply drag-and-drop emails or attachments directly to Microsoft Teams using the harmon.ie sidebar in Outlook. They save additional steps by being able to announce the addition in a post, organize it by saving it in the right spot from the start, and classify it by adding metadata tags. Chances are that without harmon.ie, at least some of those steps would get skipped lots of the time and the ease of completing this task inspires colleagues to do it more often.
By getting those emails into Teams you’re breaking down information silos and giving your colleagues better visibility. Instead of bits and pieces of data trapped in different inboxes, everything relevant is all in a virtual “shared inbox” and tagged for easy discovery.
You can also prompt further compliance by making it easy to do the right thing. Take emailing attachments. Your colleagues might know the “right” way to share a file is to put it on Teams or SharePoint and then send a permissions-based link in an email. However, that adds a lot of extra steps if the file isn’t already on Teams and easy to find, so folks take a shortcut, hit the paperclick button, and send off that attachment into the ether.
But when files are already getting saved in Teams and end users can locate it, generate a permissions-based link, and email it all without leaving Outlook, it’s far more likely to happen. And, when end users see that this curtails frustrating and costly version control issues when everyone’s working off the same file in Teams, they’re more likely to repeat that behavior thanks to its value AND convenience.
Minimize admin overhead and credential creep
As you weigh your options on adding tools to your Information Management stack, don’t forget the work they might create for you and your team. If provisioning is labor intensive, it will slow the rollout… especially if the end user must take action to put it in place.
You also don’t want to burden the workforce with yet another set of usernames and passwords to keep track of. This will automatically turn off a portion of the user base and keep your help desk busy with reset requests. Using a Microsoft 365 Add-in when possible will make everyone’s lives easier and increase end-user adoption.
A real-world case study from the manufacturing industry
DRASS, a global manufacturing firm that specializes in hyperbaric solutions, wanted to break down informational silos and merge the activity occurring with external parties via emails in Outlook and the internal collaborative activities happening in Teams. Their goal was to get important emails and attachments out of Outlook and into Teams and SharePoint, where colleagues could access this important data and rest assured that everyone was working off the same up-to-date version.
The organization rolled out harmon.ie to make it easy to move emails and attachments out of Outlook, quickly dragging and dropping them to the right location via the harmon.ie sidebar. To aid with speedy discovery on Teams, end users are prompted to add metadata for each email and file they save. To reinforce the need to move emails to Teams, the organization has continually shrunk the Outlook email storage for each end user.
“Adoption was smooth,” said Cesare D’Amico, IT Manager at DRASS Group. “We didn’t do any training, we simply post training videos on our Streams site in Teams and our workers self-educate.”
