It’s a new year, and for many companies, that means investing in a new digital initiative. Digital adoption and digital transformation continue to be driving forces for companies of every size.
According to Harvard Business Review, companies spent $1.3 trillion on digital transformation last year, and nearly 70 percent of it was wasted.
Yes, $900 billion wasted on unsuccessful digital initiatives. So how can you avoid a digital disaster and reap the benefits of a successful digital transformation?
In this blog, we’re examining your Digital Transformation ROI, starting with what metrics to track to measure digital ROI and ending with tips for improving your return on investment.
Ask the Right Questions
Team leads, Department Managers, and IT leaders should collectively analyze whether their digital initiatives are showing any results.
Usually, IT leaders use comparative analytics to measure the impact. But what questions do they ask to get the right answers?
Well, usually the team looking after the Digital Transformation efforts asks:
- Is the organization adopting the right digital tools?
- Are these tools enabling excellence in the job?
- At what pace are these initiatives rolling out?
- Are they being used in the desired manner?
- Which department is lagging in the usage of the new tools?
- Are these initiatives delivering on the invested money and resources?
Finding the answers to these questions makes the life of all the stakeholders easy and will help them plan better to increase the return of their investment. But to do that, regular analysis is a must.
Need a Reliable Team
The team that will look after the Digital Transformation initiatives must be reliable, with a proper mix of people across the organization.
The team should be well equipped to manage the task.It will be their job to lay the technical foundation and design the business process.
A team that can understand the technical and as well as business intricacies of the transformation efforts can help you boost your digital ROI.
Rope in External Expertise
There is no doubt that you need an incredible in-house team but that alone might not make your transformation efforts great. You have to use the expertise of a consultant to stay on track during the whole process.
It might prove to be a bit expensive but with a consultant, you can:
- Design better business processes.
- Keep a check on your service partner.
- Be assured that your Digital Transformation effort is on track.
- Be assured that your team is learning and getting better at executing things.
The value that a consultant could bring is unparalleled and you can realize value out of your efforts in no time.
Be Agile and Flexible
Digital Transformation is not a one-time thing, it is a continuous journey. It is not a single project which you can execute within a few months or years.
Technology is changing constantly and so are businesses; this results in a change in business processes.
A company must be agile enough to adopt any change in technology in the middle of its Digital Transformation efforts.
Of course, it won’t be easy to accommodate changes while your transformation is in progress, but if your organization can tame the beast of change while rolling out the digital initiatives then return on such executions could be worthwhile.
All you need to do is break up the process into a small action plan and test it on a control group for a targeted outcome before rolling it out across the organization.
Measuring Your Digital ROI
Calculating the return on your digital investments can be difficult. Obviously, you expect some advantage to implement new technology, but how do you measure its impact and value?
Below is a list of some of the metrics you can look at to determine the value of your digital transformation initiatives.
| Focus – Who does the digital investment benefit? | Goal – What value is expected from the new digital technology? | Metrics – How can the value be measured? |
| Customers |
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| Employees |
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| Operations |
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In general, digitizing your business processes should make them easier and faster to complete. Digital initiatives should also improve both customer and employee experiences. These improvements should lead to cost savings and better revenue.
How to Improve Digital Transformation ROI?
Once you’ve identified the value to expect from your digital investments and how to measure it, what do you do when the results aren’t what you expected?
As we said earlier, most digital transformation initiatives fail or deliver lackluster results. If you need to improve your digital ROI, you’ll need to address these common issues with any digital transformation.
Adoption
You’re never going to see a real ROI on your digital investments if people don’t use the technology. For technology to deliver gains in employee productivity and performance, it has to be successfully integrated across your entire business.
If users don’t understand the need for change or find the technology too difficult, then they could resist using it. Spending millions to build a new office and then not using it is clearly wasteful. Unused technology is just as wasteful.
You’ll need a thorough Digital Adoption and change management strategy in place to overcome adoption challenges.
Onboarding
One of the main reasons people fail to adopt new technology is a lack of onboarding. A proper user onboarding program will help users understand both how and why they need to use new technology.
Onboarding ensures users are comfortable and familiar with the technology and how to complete your unique processes using the new systems.
User onboarding can make or break a digital transformation project. The old cliche is true – you only get one chance to make a first impression. How you onboard your users will influence their views on new technology and processes.
If the onboarding is inadequate, people will assume the fault is with the technology or that the new procedures are too complicated. Ensuring you have a great employee training and onboarding experience is essential to getting the best ROI.
Support
If your adoption and onboarding are poor, odds are your support team will be overwhelmed with tickets and issues related to your new technology. Monitoring your support efforts should be the first line of defense in protecting your digital ROI.
If you have to invest significantly more in support, then the digital initiative is most likely not delivering the efficiency you expected. Many people often assume that they’ll need a ton of help to adopt new technology, but that assumption eats away at your ROI.
Think about it. If your technology is so cumbersome that users have to stop what they’re doing to get support to complete a routine task, then you’ve just tied up the user and the support team from working on more valuable projects.
Leveraging a Digital Adoption Solution to Boost Digital Transformation ROI
If you’re struggling with adoption, onboarding, or support – there’s a common theme. Your digital initiative isn’t intuitive to your users, and that’s lowering your ROI.
The good news is you can reverse the trend. Digital Adoption Solutions, like Apty, are designed to make technology easier to use. Apty helps users navigate new software with on-screen guidance and built-in onboarding tools.
Apty also provides stakeholders with advanced analytics for tracking adoption rates and identifying process improvements.
