If your business is like most, it relies heavily on software to drive strategic digital transformation. Yet how many of your company’s app deployments end with successful adoption and ongoing software usage at the heart of your digital processes?
It’s quite possible that as much as 55% of the many apps you’ve invested in go unused regularly. And the answer might lie in your approach to change management.
Unfortunately, traditional change management often disappoints when it comes to software adoption. Why? The reasons are many.
Traditional change management over-indexes on training how to use a single software app. Yet even most companies run their businesses on processes that call upon multiple applications simultaneously. When L&D or other training teams hyperfocus on the software, they overlook the people and processes it intends to serve.
Prioritizing go-live, many training teams fail to support user adoption in the following days and months properly. Adoption never reaches meaningful levels without insight into where and why users struggle.
Once adoption issues become clear, the change management team needs executive buy-in to move forward with next-level user training and support. In other words, they must sign off on the budget for even more training.
69% of the companies have or plan to have a COE in the next 2 years – capsresearch
Whether your organization has found itself in one or more of these common scenarios, user adoption has likely fallen far short of expectations. And poor user adoption translates to a productivity hit for the business overall, and your IT or change management team as users seek handholding to get up to speed. This problem repeats – and is compounded – with every SaaS app update or process change.
It’s a must to go beyond go-live
Meaningful software adoption goes beyond user onboarding and training. So how can your organization ensure success? Let’s start by reminding ourselves of the reason for change management.
According to the Association of Change Management Professionals, change management is “the practice of applying a structured process to transition an organization from a current state to a future state to achieve expected benefits.” In other words, true change management is about realizing measurable value by satisfying your business case and generating ROI.
And you can do just that by:
- Focusing on the end-user experience
- Ensuring updated or new software is usable and intuitive
- Making the process easy and better with each new or updated app deployment
Remember: You must do more than take users to live with new (or updated) software. What’s critical is sustainably driving user uptake – while satisfying the newest generation of workers who expect to be intuitively guided through software. In other words, you must guide users step by step through app usage in the moment of need.
According to Gartner, a “center of excellence accelerates the uptake of new technologies and optimizes core capabilities with higher efficiency and lower costs.”
Success hinges on understanding user behavior and ensuring the desired behaviors that lead to software and process adoption – and measurably better business outcomes.
Enter digital adoption
Digital adoption is the answer because it seamlessly helps new users onboard quickly while guiding existing users through new releases and complex processes.
According to Bianca Di Lucente Lieb, Senior Director of Change Management for RiseNow – “People inherently resist change. By pairing traditional change management with digital adoption, organizations defuse the jarring nature of the change, and that’s what makes the productivity drop less drastic.”
Many organizations are enhancing their change management programs with a digital adoption platform (DAP). This tool empowers them to bring users at any level — by division, region, team, and/or role — up to speed on both software and process changes in a streamlined, seamless way.
According to BCG research, only 30% of digital transformations are successful and meet or exceed their target value. Digital center of excellence is key to successfully implementing DX in your organization.
As a DAP helps users learn software-based tasks and functions, it collects and analyzes data about user behavior to provide insight into what is and isn’t working through metrics like user experience, engagement, and milestone completion. This enables organizations to adapt their change management process as necessary to accelerate the adoption of technologies into daily workflows and enforce business process compliance. In effect, a DAP serves as an ROI tracker to prove adoption success, and that ROI becomes apparent in fewer support resources and tickets and higher, faster adoption rates.
Gartner predicts that “By 2025, 70% of organizations will use digital adoption solutions across the entire technology stack to overcome still insufficient application user experiences.”
Mature to a center of excellence
After experiencing the transformative power of a DAP, many savvy organizations further evolve their transformation capabilities by launching a digital adoption center of excellence (CoE). This group of internal stakeholders is dedicated to establishing standards and driving the company-wide success of software-enabled processes. By sharing best practices, they help ensure everyone can learn and adopt technology that powers business processes, growth, and transformation.
“93% of organizations who report excellent change management effectiveness meet or exceed their objectives.” – Prosci
If you’re ready to accelerate and enhance the impact of your change management initiatives,
Change Management with a Digital Adoption Center of Excellence
- The challenging state of change management
- The ultimate goal of change management
- How to ensure lasting transformation with DAP-enabled change
- What it takes to mature to a digital adoption CoE
- How to successfully establish a digital adoption CoE
