Some users may even engage in acts of outright sabotage, such as padding the figures they enter in the system or deliberately blocking out all the free space in their workgroup calendar to prevent others from scheduling their time. Don't delude yourself that users will altruistically donate their time entering data so that a financial controller they've never met can have an easier time of things, or that they'll use the system simply because management says they should. In it, he claimed that the most successful groupware systems are those whose benefits go to the people who do the work. E-mail has become one of the few truly successful groupware applications, primarily because it benefits all users equally. Contrast this with our Project Financial Tracking System, where project managers were expected to spend large amounts of time entering data so that executive management would be able to work more effectively, but they received no concrete benefit for themselves.
Social incentives can also be effective.
Providing motivation by explaining why using the system is good for the company as a whole might help, but the most successful systems focus on the direct benefit to the people expected to do the work. As much as possible, groupware developers should do their best to motivate people to use the system, while minimizing any down sides such as a steep learning curve or politically uncomfortable reporting requirements. In the end, you want to make it more convenient for users to use your system than to not use it. In the end the most popular direction was chosen. The experimenter gushed on the videotape about the benefits of this system, saying that the anonymous nature of the discussion enabled even the lowliest Junior Engineer to present ideas to the whole group, while at the same time to openly critique an idea that might have been put forth by the Director of Operations.