Training, Adoption, and Governance

In Chapter 10, I explained why I think that training as a classroom exercise is less than optimal. However, I realize that my coaching manifesto may be too much too soon for some organizations. If this is the case with your organization, then yes, send your content owners and authors on training, but you must make sure they have enough support once they get back to work, otherwise they will have to just do their best with whatever parts of the training stuck. For some of them, this will be great stuff; for others, they’ll head way off course and just figure out whatever works, and some will just give up and use whatever archaic systems they can—or find outside services to host their content. These outcomes—chaos or adoption failure—are closely aligned with governance and training. As I said in Chapter 10, governance without enforcement is just suggestion. You have to stay on top of your owners and authors to ensure they are building a system that has value to the users and that meets the company’s goals and implements company policy. The most effective form of training is coaching people on how best to use the new system as they learn to add their own content to it.