Adoption Is Not Deployment

You can deploy a PID system, write a data management plan, and build a knowledge graph — and still fail if nobody uses them. Here's why adoption is a design problem.

Most infrastructure projects treat the go-live as the finish line. But deployment only changes what's possible; adoption changes what actually happens. The gap between the two is where deposit forms get abandoned, identifiers go uncited, and beautifully modelled graphs sit half-populated.

Adoption is decided at the points where data is described, created, or collected — the deposit form, the lab notebook, the instrument capture screen. Design those well, measure drop-off honestly, and adoption stops being a hope and starts being a metric you can move.