Digital transformation is a key factor in Enterprise growth. It’s clear that ensuring the right tools are available to the workforce provides a competitive advantage and can support strategic outcomes such as margin reduction, enhanced employee experience, risk reduction, and revenue growth. But investing, deploying, and integrating enterprise technology solutions is a complex process and in the current digital economy, projects often have to be prioritized based on the return they deliver, and the speed with which they promise to do it.
The move to a hybrid workplace embraced by many organizations further pushes the boundary as technology is more essential than ever for keeping employees engaged, and ensuring they are equipped to work as effectively in a remote environment as they are on-site, while simultaneously protecting their well-being and motivation.
But potentially the largest risk to the success of a transformation project is low digital adoption. Implementing a new software product is only the start of the journey: employees must receive appropriate, targeted training as well as continuous support and knowledge updates, especially given the frequency with which modern applications are updated. These problems are not easily addressed using traditional training methods, which are expensive, difficult to deliver at scale, and complicated to deliver in a hybrid working environment.
All this mounts up to added pressure on an often already challenged IT team, who regularly become the first port-of-call when people have a problem.
The cumulative effective of all of this is that productivity often takes a significant hit, the TCO for the new technology goes up, and the ROI that was promised to the executive sponsor becomes harder to quantify and realize.
How then, do you reduce the TCO and the risk of low digital adoption?
It’s critical that you’re investing in your digital adoption strategy to ensure employees are empowered to embrace the new technology you’ve delivered them, can successfully master new tools, and achieve the digital tasks that often form a key (or they key!) component of their role.
Companies can look to do this by implementing a dedicated digital adoption platform, or by leveraging data and metrics available to them via disparate systems that may already be available in the estate, including workforce and systems analytics platforms, ITAM tools, and task mining applications amongst others.
By looking in detail, and in context, at how employees engage with the new technology business leaders can get critical insights into all areas of adoption: what features are or aren’t being used; where employees might be struggling or missing key benefits of the new technology that’s been delivered to them; where they may (or may not) be following governance processes, where productivity – and employee experience – could be improved.
Organizations should be mindful of assuming that usage data, often extracted from ITAM/SAM tools, is enough to give them the data they need to make informed decisions about engagement. While this usage data is useful for making licensing-based procurement decisions, it doesn’t go deep enough into the adoption of a technology to give you meaningful, actionable insight. You need to know not only are the new applications being used, but how are they being used. Which features, specifically, in which order. Where do bottlenecks occur? Where are features being overlooked? These data points are critical to enable targeted action to address low adoption issues.
Failing to prioritize adoption can result in significant wasted spend. According to a study by the Boston Consulting Group, a staggering 70% of digital transformation projects fail entirely, or fail to deliver the promised benefits. The average enterprise wastes $4.1m annually on these failed initiatives.
Scalable helps address these issues by combining the best of all worlds: workforce analytics, ITAM data, and task mining information in a single, manager-friendly platform that shows what’s really going on at the adoption level. We give our customers accurate, near-real-time observation data to baseline, drive adoption, eliminate digital process friction, and quickly identify issues and take corrective action to maximize ROI.
Using our Acumen platform customers can analyze how employees engage with their technology, the paths they take, the features they use, mapped to expected journeys. Acumen helps identify where bottlenecks and blockers occur by looking not only at the application itself, but also what else is happening in the employees environment that could be causing friction.
Armed with this information, business leaders can decrease the TCO for new software products which ensuring maximum digital adoption.