The growing popularity of desktop collaboration solutions, including Web conferencing, instant messaging, and desktop video conferencing, is fueling increased interest in the promise of increased employee productivity gains, amazing financial returns, and a wholesale transformation of business processes into a new realm of communication. Companies have invested millions in collaboration software and countless resources preparing their networks, pushing software clients to desktops, and readying for the forecasted flood of employees adopting these solutions.

Although the investments have been widespread, the returns on these investments have most often been disappointing. Actual adoption of the collaboration solutions across the enterprise has generally fallen short of expectations. Actual end-user usage most often misses projections with only a limited number of customers reporting that they have achieved the intended goals of their investments. In many organizations reporting strong usage, the majority of actual usage occurs within limited pockets of the enterprise dominated by a small minority of users.

Unfortunately for many companies, adoption remains slow and the promise of tremendous benefits provided across the enterprise remain unfulfilled.

The purpose of this whitepaper is to illustrate the most effective practices for driving robust and sustained adoption of collaboration services across an enterprise. Corvent’s consultants have repeatedly identified a series of attributes that play a critical role in the success of the adoption of collaborative tools. These seven attributes have a direct impact on the velocity of adoption within an enterprise. By focusing on these attributes, companies may accelerate the adoption of the service and thus the return on the investments made in the software.