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Why digital adoption platforms are at the epicenter of tech stack optimization
Why digital adoption platforms are at the epicenter of tech stack optimization
You've invested in platforms to drive your organization forward. It's been an investment case to maximize efficiencies, provide slicker processes, and ultimately increase performance and revenues. But it’s not quite working.
In today's digital landscape, making informed decisions about your technology investments and their performance is critical. Your application portfolio is a valuable asset, requiring ongoing governance and refinement, and future-fit businesses understand the importance of optimizing theirs to remain modern and economically sound.
Nevertheless, technology can still underperform for a variety of reasons. One of the more common is poor user engagement and experience. When users encounter a new technology solution that is illogical or difficult to use, frustration and disengagement soon follow. It is these negative perceptions that can ultimately lead to a solution's underperformance or even outright failure.
To prevent this costly situation from arising, businesses are increasingly reducing, modernizing, and harmonizing the technology they’ve invested in. And, what they’re turning to for growth, transformation, and optimization, are digital adoption platforms (DAPs).
Gartner said in its Market Guide for Digital Adoption Platforms (2022), “Organizations seeking to accelerate digital transformation must enable employees to easily adopt new and changing technology. Application leaders should examine digital adoption platform providers that enable employees and/or customers to better adopt technology and perform at a higher level.”
In this piece, we explore why the human experience sits behind successful technology adoption, rather than the technology itself. We define what is meant by tech stack optimization and why it starts with a DAP that’s governed by a digital employee experience leader. Moreover, we share what a DAP ultimately means for your business.
Understanding the human experience behind long-term digital adoption success
Rather than technology, it is people who make or break optimization and transformation initiatives. Indeed, our recent The Hidden Cost of the Digital Employee Experience research found that 39% of employees who use business applications spend up to 30 minutes a day looking for support, totaling more than three weeks a year, per employee.
For large businesses in the UK, this could translate to over 70,000 annual hours of lost productivity. For large businesses in the US, the figure is over 170,000 hours.
However, enterprise software investment can only be successful if employees understand how it works and can use it accordingly.
By speaking with our own clients, we have learnt that a variety of triggers lead businesses to confront the issue of poor digital adoption and improve tech stack optimization. These include:
- Poor user experiences and subsequent engagement
- Increased user frustration when completing processes that span multiple-applications with different user interfaces
- Inability to determine how well new systems are being received
- Target solution complexity that causes input errors
- Failure of small teams to support large user communities with proper training
- Poor or failed system implementations
- Rapid growth, meaning an unworkable number of employees must be onboarded simultaneously
- Reliance on "just in time" guidance for users to input potentially critical data into systems
What is tech stack optimization, and why start with a DAP?
Tech stack optimization is the process of streamlining a company's technology infrastructure to improve efficiency, reduce costs, increase ROI, and remain competitive. However, creating a cohesive and effective tech stack can be challenging with so many different tools and applications available.
Often, poor or failed usage of solutions is due to a company’s inability to determine how well new systems are received and adopted by users, whether from a lack of user feedback, poor data collection, or inadequate understanding of user needs. As many businesses have experienced, software proficiency and user adoption issues can significantly impact productivity, workforce satisfaction, and retention.
It is precisely these challenges that have given rise to DAPs. The software solution helps users learn how to use new software applications quickly and effectively with step-by-step guidance through various processes and tasks. And it helps businesses pinpoint areas that require optimization to improve the experience through detailed user insights.
A key benefit of DAPs is their ability to reduce the learning curve associated with new software applications. When companies implement new tools or applications, the time needed for users to learn how to use them effectively creates a period of inefficiency and reduced productivity.
With a DAP in place, providing logical training, step-by-step guidance and support features, users can quickly familiarize themselves with new software applications, accelerate their journey towards proficiency, and ensure the business realizes the full potential of its technology investment.
Humanizing the digital experience for long-term technology success
According to our Hidden Cost of the Digital Employee Experience research that looked into the in-application behavior of 1 million users, 58% of employees said the number of business applications they use has increased since March 2020.
76% reported that they spend up to six hours a day using them. As few employees are able to handle every application with expertise, it is easy to see how it’s possible that so many hours of productivity can be lost. Moreover, why one in five employees expressed that they are more frustrated with business applications. Their frustrations are not without basis. The rise in applications and digital processes means that, on average, employees switch between 35 disparately connected yet business-critical applications more than 1,000 times each day. Sometimes to complete just a single process.
Together, it means users lose confidence, administrative burdens increase, and adoption rates begin to decline. DAPs protect the business against these risks by stitching together the entire technology stack, bringing consistency and improvements to the digital employee experience (DEX).
On the topic of DEX, in a recent report by Gartner, clients who reported not getting value from their DEX tools implemented them by following the vendor’s best practices. However, because ROI was achieved during the preliminary clean-up phases of deployment, crucial organizational change objectives were missed.
By missing these objectives, clients continued to experience such issues as:
- Chronically unstable or underperforming applications
- Unhappy employees who avoid calling the service desk because of time restraints or a lack of trust that issues will get resolved
- Devices that are beyond their useful life or are underpowered for their usage patterns
- Unused or underutilized applications that could be reallocated to avoid buying more licenses
At around 18 months, the point at which it becomes too difficult to find new benefits that justify the ongoing cost, clients reach a phase of diminishing returns. Avoiding this predicament requires the appointment of infrastructure & operations leaders who take ownership of and allocate dedicated resources to expand DEX tool adoption.
The rise of the digital employee experience leader
The concept of a DEX leader—now advocated by Gartner—is gaining popularity and enjoying greater focus in boardrooms that lack digital literacy.
Though most enterprises recognize the importance of digital adoption at a top level, an absence of responsibility for overseeing digital adoption measures creates risk. Enterprises know adoption is crucial, but fewer than a quarter (22%) use it as a KPI for digital transformation success.
Often recognized as a symptom of ‘SaaS bloat’, poor adoption is largely attributed to an ever-increasing number of software applications with different, and often complex, interfaces. Employees are routinely expected to familiarize themselves with multiple applications, all of which look and work differently. As a result, measuring adoption rates becomes an almost impossible task. And if enterprises can’t measure digital adoption, they can’t track progress.
‘SaaS bloat’ has also become particularly troublesome since the pandemic. Though businesses invested heavily in software to enable remote working and improve the DEX, the reality was that the volume of new software added to technology estates, hindered both.
In its paper, How to successfully deploy a DEX tool, Gartner discusses creating an environment for successful DEX deployment. Gartner’s view is that DEX leaders should unify digital environments by putting employees at the center, creating a human experience that steers individuals, teams, and, ultimately, the business to successful outcomes.
As success requires the constant development of new skill sets, forward-thinking companies are investing in this new type of professional whose designated role is driving employee digital adoption. Indeed, many businesses are appointing dedicated DEX leaders to review and harmonize the digital landscape specifically for the benefit of workforce. By creating a ‘digital thread’ that ties the digital environment together, employee frustration with software is reduced and successful outcomes are more clearly signposted.
By ensuring employees have the skills to make full use of ever-evolving tech stacks, businesses' digital investments are prevented from going to waste. Ideally, DEX leaders will use a DAP to make it as seamless and straightforward as possible for employees to use the extensive assortment of software and applications available.
The DAP helps the DEX leader achieve this objective by providing employees with real-time in-app guidance—in the form of step-by-step tours and pop-ups—that neither breaks workflows nor requires context switching. Meanwhile, content is contextualized with existing materials made immediately accessible when needed, and confusion is stopped at source as UI updates and rework no longer impact productivity or support costs. Onboarding is also made quicker and easier, with your employees orientated and up to speed with new or existing apps in a fraction of the time. A global electronics manufacturer and distributor saved over £180,000 of rework correcting user errors when rolling out a new HR platform through use of a DAP.
However, this digital responsibility extends beyond the boundaries of IT departments. Businesses are set to invest heavily in digital transformation initiatives over the next three years. According to Gartner, this amounts to a US$7 million average spend among small firms, US$22 million among medium firms, and over US$31 million among large firms.
Such levels of investment mean IT departments cannot shoulder sole responsibility for the success of digital transformation projects. Identifying and highlighting digital friction points, areas money can be saved, and opportunities to capitalize on existing tech investments is too onerous for one department to manage. Adoption needs C-suite buy-in and for the recently appointed DEX leaders to position themselves as change champions.
With a unified front consisting of IT and senior leaders, businesses can transform their entire tech stacks, moving away from disjointed, confusing user interfaces and toward consistent, accessible experiences that empower employees to produce their best work.
Of course, such digital transformation strategies depend heavily on the workforce actually using the digital tools deployed. No matter its quality, investment in technology is wasted if employees avoid using it. This potential pitfall can be averted by taking a strategic approach and regularly measuring business impact with dedicated roles established to drive continual progress.
Experience mining: identifying usage and meeting the 'so what’ test
To create a digital employee experience that works for your people, you need a deep understanding of their operating environment and the paths they take within it. The challenge is mining and delivering the necessary data to your business intelligently.
Typically, this challenge would be approached by compiling analytics that identifies pain points, such as tasks that are often completed incorrectly. However, it can be difficult to identify recurring pain points with only the data that vendors make available. It is a difficulty all but eradicated by a DAP.
A DAP layers over software programs, learning how employees use and interact with them and tracking day-to-day engagement. While leaders pinpoint recurring issues using the data gathered, the DAP provides users with support, such as step-by-step guides, pop-ups, or directing users to in-app resources when user difficulty is detected.
Crucially, any employee data that’s harvested is fully anonymized. A DAP is a tool to encourage digital adoption, not a form of employee tracking software.
So what, you might ask? Well, it means you get maximum value from your software and, thus, higher ROI.
DAPs: the solution for digital workplace success
Software applications are subject to constant updates, with new features regularly added to keep up with the ever-evolving technology world. Almost all enterprise software receives a major update each quarter, with many new features introduced as part of each release. As such, providing training on new software solutions cannot be a singular event. If successful digital adoption is the goal, employees need their understanding of how tools and software work to be constantly refreshed. Through use of a DAP, a leading drinks manufacturer reduced helpdesk tickets by over 2000 following each and every software update by helping end users understands the interface changes.
Although a boost to digital adoption is a major benefit, the impact of a DAP’s ability to stitch entire technology stacks together cannot be overstated. As well as creating a unified experience for users, DEX is radically improved, frustration is reduced, and digital burdens are all but eliminated. By using a DAP across three applications, a leading chemical and pharmaceutical company was able to save 2,500 hours of user frustration over the course of 12 month which led to a boost in workforce productivity.
A DAP can even take on the work of experience mining described above. Configured to sit in 'listening mode', the DAP allows you to see where users spend their time, take too long on tasks, or appear to be stuck, before pinpointing exactly where extra support is needed. Rather than peppering applications with random help and guidance, DAPs proactively place support where it will have the most impact, negating the need to invest in face-to-face training costs.
Today’s tech needs more than traditional helpdesk or document-driven support. With the right DAP in place, you not only see how your people use the software you’ve invested in, but you can place real-time guidance into apps that boost understanding and drive productivity.
Article by
Adam McVey
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