Field note
Building an adoption heatmap that leadership will actually open
A cloud suite adoption heatmap for internal business applications should be small enough to discuss in one sitting. Twenty applications by six capabilities is often enough; forty by twenty becomes wallpaper.
Each cell needs a signal: interview confirmation, usage export, or observed workflow. Colour without evidence trains leadership to ignore the chart. We label confidence beside colour so sparse cells do not look equal to well-evidenced ones.
Present idle licences as a separate strip, not as a heatmap colour. Finance stakeholders read currency and seat counts more readily than abstract red-amber-green alone.
Leave one blank column for “not applicable.” Forcing every application to score against every suite capability invents problems that do not exist.