"Before you try to increase your willpower, try to decrease the friction in your environment." - James Clear

I'm a big fan of James Clear (who writes on habits) because so much of data management is about habits.

What Clear is saying above is that if you want to change behavior, you need to make it as easy as possible ("decrease the friction") to make that behavior change. This is remarkably important in data management, especially as it applies to user adoption of new systems or processes.

For example, a client might say "I want my staff to capture more data about their interactions with members and customers, but staff just isn't doing it." Further investigation shows that one of the issues is that the technology requires a LOT of work from the user to enter the data. Because there is so much "friction" in the process (or the technology, or both), adoption of the process is low. One way to address this (with more modern systems) is to change the actual layout of the data pages and forms, making it easier to enter the specific data we want to capture.

The friction might be coming from the technology, or the process, or both. They key is to identify where the friction is, and then work on removing as much of the friction as possible.

So where is the friction in your organization? And what can be done to minimize it?