With the launch of the new canada digital adoption program, businesses are starting to ask about the crucial role business technology plays in the growth or stagnation of their business. Over the last 10 years or so, we’ve built a solid reputation for being Digital Adoption specialists by helping Sr. Leaders, Technology Managers and Business Owners:
- Deploy technology changes that stick over time
- Create a culture where your employees expect & champion change
- Free up employee time by better using the technology you are investing in
- Allow you to focus on your day job.
There are still too many business owners and managers who feel overworked and underwhelmed by the lack of benefits being realized from your technology. With the Canadian Digital Adoption Program (CDAP) Grant becoming more popular they are asking the right questions like, “what is digital adoption?” and “Why do I need it?”. In this article we are covering our discoveries of the of the top three reasons Why Digital Adoption Efforts Fail? This question has also helped us design our Digital Adoption Pathways
At PACE.global we believe technology should always deliver measurable results. We will be publishing a series of weekly blogs to get you on the path, but we wanted to highlight the top mistakes we’ve seen businesses make when it comes to digital adoption.
Mistake #1: You Believe Technology is the Silver Bullet to Your Productivity Problems
All technology is designed to be helpful and yes of course it can help you increase your productivity by reducing the manual work your people end up doing, so you buy the tool.
The problem is you haven’t taken the time to properly identify & Communicate the work they can stop doing as a result of this new technology and as we all know work expands to fill the time available, so productivity gains are never realized.
If this sounds like you, don’t worry you are not alone according to a recent study only 5% of Canadian businesses that invested in technology were able to get full value out of their technology.
Mistake #2: Relying on the Vendor Training as a method of User Adoption
I know you are probably thinking I thought I was supposed to provide training to my employees, who better than the vendor to do this job?
Think back to the last time you attended a 2-3 hour training session, how much did you remember? How much time do your employees actually have to go back and review their training? Did the generic training actually enlighten them on how to do their jobs better?
The worst part about this is that you not only wasted all that precious time out of your day to day operations, you’re now stuck being the bad cop or worse yet we’ve seen some of our clients get stuck with the obligation to produce the data themselves which requires to take on administrative functions, they don’t need.
Mistake #3: You Think of Technology Adoption as an “Event” rather than a culture change
Do you really think your business is going to eventually stop adopting new technologies for productivity or sales? Remember if you are not growing you are stagnating. Some businesses have “go live” events where they provide extra people to support the users for the first couple weeks and then expect them to keep sustaining the change only to find some employees hanging on to their trusty excel sheets and doing work arounds in the software. In one instance we found a team print the electronic version of a paper based document – so they could create their temporary paper files and add in their sticky notes they had become accustomed to.