Technology Adoption is crucial in supporting any organization’s digital transformation journey. Still, the majority of IT Teams spend a lot of hard work, huge budgets, and time managing this change but fall short of poor end-user adoption of the technologies they are introducing. Regardless of what anyone might say, you can provide employees with the best software available, but your investment goes to waste if nobody is using them.
There are several key mistakes that we have observed in technology adoption programs IT teams run. We will highlight the top 5 and give some recommendations on how you can avoid them.
Does It Solve Your Employee’s Problems?
A lot of the time, IT Teams introduce new technologies that don’t add a lot of value to employees which results in resistance to using the new software. If you acquire quality software that has a clear and profound impact on the employee’s work, adoption would happen on its own. Make sure whenever you are considering acquiring or building new solutions to consult with your users and see if this solution adds a lot of value and benefit to them before proceeding.
Do They Know How To Use It?
Regardless of how much time and effort you put into implementing or developing a new solution, users who are accustomed to old platforms will not shift easily. Every IT Team should solve this by ensuring they issue quality documentation, provide a mixture of training (Classroom, Online, Video on Demand, Tutorials), and build software socialization activities to smooth the adoption process.
Continuous Efforts Instead of Ones Just During the Launch
IT Teams think that employees will quickly pick up new technology once launched, but even if the software is an improvement of what they had, they will slowly start drifting back to the old software because they are used to it. Users need time to learn the ins and outs of the software they use, and if they don’t have a firm grip on the functionality, they won't use it daily. Keep educating them not only during the launch phase, and make it easy for them to access information and help when they need it.
Initial Resistors
In every company regardless of how hard you try, there will be a group of employees that will resist any new technology. The traditional approach was to avoid them and focus on the other employees. This is wrong since once the other employees see that they are still doing work the old way they will start drifting back and refusing the new changes. Instead of neglecting them, you can use them as test subjects early on, giving them beta access, listening to their experience, and seeing how they might help you improve your software. If they turn from resistors to early adopters it will make your adoption plan much easier.
Getting The Stakeholder Agreement
If there is an ideological rift within the business regarding new software implementation, more issues will present themselves as the project progresses, or, worse yet, user adoption efforts may flat-out fail. The best approach is to keep a constant pulse on stakeholder opinions, sparking up macro-level conversations as often as possible. By discussing and debating the biggest issues in a project, stakeholders are encouraged to create a unified plan based on the most important question at hand: What's the best way to win user adoption with this project?
Final Words
Technology adoption isn’t about events, training, and announcements only. It is a systematic approach aimed at understanding user needs, showing them how you will be helping them meet their objectives, removing their restraints, training them, and continuously supporting them during your transformation journey. What most companies fail to see is that employee adoption is a core of their digital transformation journey, without their users having the best software in the world won't be enough to give them the edge they are seeking.
Technology Adoption With Exceed
Our 400+ team members have had the opportunity to deal with some of the region's largest customers. Giving it the experience needed to navigate digital adoption challenges.