The COVID-19 pandemic has been a catalyst for Digital Transformation initiatives – something which remain a key priority today. Gareth Hutchins, Director, Solution Architecture – Europe and North America, OpenText, discusses the key ways to ensure your people are on board to gain full business value from your Digital Transformation journey.
The demands put on businesses by the global health crisis – remote working in particular – meant many organisations were forced to accelerate their Digital Transformation initiatives. Today, as we emerge from the worst effects of the pandemic, Digital Transformation remains a top priority for 96% of business leaders. Three-quarters of organisations, however, report facing barriers to the success of their transformation efforts.
Realising the full business value of Digital Transformation is much more than just successfully implementing new technology and migrating a company’s data and workflows. The most important thing is to ensure all your people are on board, otherwise there’s little chance your new technology will be adopted and implemented.
There are four key ways in which this can be achieved:
1. Focus on people; understand their needs and ways of working
The most important thing a business can do to encourage the adoption of new technology is to focus on the needs of the people that are going to use it. Technical goals matter, of course, but you should make it a priority to ensure that everyone in the business understands the value of the new technology and that they know how to use it.
Enablement alone isn’t necessarily enough to ensure strong adoption. Ensuring widespread and successful utilisation also depends on being able to bridge the gap between the technical capabilities of a particular solution and the specific needs of users. Asking the following questions can help clarify this:
- How does the technology support users in working more efficiently, or with less room for error?
- What processes does the technology streamline?
- What new challenges might it create?
The Gartner research report, User Technology Adoption Readiness Index Helps Target Organizations Ready for Digital Transformation, highlights the importance of making sure any new technology is aligned with users’ needs, arguing that ‘users can and do make decisions about how to adopt new software based on their attitudes and experience’.
2. Clearly communicate a new technology’s benefits to employees
Encouraging users to adopt new technology requires clear communication. In many cases, it’s not enough for users just to understand the benefits of technology at an organisational or business level. If you hope to sufficiently motivate them to embrace change, you must make sure that they can see the value of a solution in terms of their own goals and deliverables. In short, they need to know what’s in it for them, personally.
Indeed, without this, it’s possible that users might lose interest. Once again, Gartner sums it up. In its research report, Cultivate the Voice of the User to Generate High-Value Adoption of Software Products, the analyst firm warns that ‘users share their positive or negative experience of software with their peers, sometimes starting a change that decreases overall usage’.
It’s important, too, to ensure that the right message is delivered to the right people. One part of the business may be interested in different features of a solution to another. There’s little point extolling what some may see as a benefit, but others consider to be irrelevant.
Overall, though, clear and open communication is vital. Not only will it reinforce the unique ways in which Digital Transformation will benefit different individuals and parts of the business, but in pre-emptively answering any questions that might arise, it will save time and improve the efficiency of the rollout.
3. Address change resistance
Even when it delivers benefits and its impact is positive, change will often meet resistance. Addressing that change is key. According to a survey carried out by Harvard Business Review, 63% of executives saw cultural challenges as the biggest barrier to their transformation efforts.
Much of this resistance comes as the result of unmet – or unrealistic – user expectations. For example, Gartner research suggests that in instances where cloud transformation initiatives aren’t delivering the results expected, the gaps between those initiatives and business results ‘are often pointers to cloud adoption challenges that need attention’.
It’s vital, then, that organisations go beyond just training on new tools and features, and address any change resistance challenges, managing expectations by highlighting the real value these tools can bring to users.
4. Target specific technologies at the right users
It’s important to bear in mind that there’s no such thing as a ‘one size fits all’ solution. Adoption will always be specific to a particular product, user group, or use case. In many instances, a single Digital Transformation initiative might introduce several new or updated technologies, only for some tools to be widely embraced while others were only minimally used.
This, then reiterates the point made earlier; that ensuring strong adoption of any new technology depends on delivering the right messages to the right audience to show the value of each tool in addressing their specific needs. User training in a technology will be significantly more valuable if it’s paired with targeted engagement initiatives to highlight how that technology supports existing business – and often personal – needs.
Digital Transformation initiatives, many of which were accelerated due to the sudden disruption caused by the pandemic, remain a key priority for most organisations today. But implementing new tools and solutions isn’t enough in itself. When it comes to successful Digital Transformation, adoption shouldn’t be thought of as the icing on the cake – it’s actually a fundamental ingredient. If a company’s people aren’t convinced of the value of its new technology, then any investment could be for nothing.
