The Role of a Digital Adoption Platform in The Digital Transformation Era

For certain, we are in the digital transformation era; every business knows how important it is to digitally transform its processes. There is an urgent need to integrate new technologies, revamp legacy systems, and everybody is seeing the need to make organizational cultures as flexible as possible.

While every business is taking digital transformation very seriously, it’s frightening to realize, according to a report, that 73% of organizations that embarked on digital transformation failed to add value to their operations. What is also very surprising about this revelation is that though there are a lot of factors that can contribute to this whopping figure, the human factor is the most outstanding; after all, 70% of digital transformation programs were reported to have failed due to resistance from employees.

This should not be the case since we have digital adoption platforms that have come to ease the burden of integrating digital transformation processes.

What is a digital adoption platform?

According to WalkMe, a digital adoption platform (DAP) is a software platform that can enable your organization to measure, drive, and act to ultimately maximize the impact of your digital transformation initiatives and quickly increase the return on your software investment. This ability comes from DAP being able to seamlessly facilitate software learning by employees in a very simple process, making your employees more proficient on any software platform, app, and website.

Why do you need a digital transformation platform?

The essence of embarking on digital transformation is to enhance your business in such a way that you can effectively increase customer experience and your ROI on software investments.

This is not quite an easy endeavor, especially with hundreds of apps or even more, you may need to incorporate into your business processes based on your need to digitally transform and fit into the new business setting. When doing this, you will have to contend with a lot of resistance from employees across boards.

Jumping from one app to another, especially if you take their complexities into account, you may experience employee burnout, dissatisfaction, and performance that is below par. The need to seamlessly streamline digital transformation and ensure that you don’t encounter these problems that can hinder your progress are exactly why you need a digital adoption platform.

Incidentally, technological advancements in the process of reshaping the IT industry, have ensured that digital adoption platforms are powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, forcing a dramatic rethink of strategies; to this extent, it is relatively easy for you to personalize a digital adoption platform to address any specific needs. By integrating AI and machine learning into DAPs you can use the insights you gather to identify an employee’s shortcomings and provide tailored guidance in real-time that will ease the friction that occurs due to biases employees have to re-training.

Frictions and resistance occur when employees find it difficult to adopt any new technology and as a fundamental aspect of digital transformation, this can greatly hurt the project. Successful businesses in the world, today, know the importance of data and large volumes of data.

Handling these large volumes of data is not an easy task if you want to do it manually; hence, you need to integrate AI and machine learning to sort out some knotty issues. When employees find it difficult to grasp the relevant training required to understand the workings of the new technology, they tend to resist your change initiative.

You end up with missed revenue and employee turnover. Traditionally, your IT team should be responsible for handling employees’ surface key training and the requisite knowledge for onboarding; this places a lot of burden on IT, hence limiting effectiveness in the more serious areas of enhancing productivity and ensuring customer satisfaction.

This is the area a digital adoption platform can help to address with the digital adoption software. The problem, however, is, do you have a digital adoption strategy?

What is a digital adoption strategy?

A digital adoption strategy is a process you need to create a plan to seamlessly adopt any digital transformation initiative. It enables you to optimize the process, sideline frictions, and resistance, and create a roadmap that seamlessly supports your organization's goal.

If you go about optimizing your legacy system, that may not be a bad initiative, but you need to ensure that you also have a plan in place to remove any resistance. Once you leave room for resistance to crop up, you will have created problems.

To enable a resistance-free digital transformation, you must have a digital adoption strategy, which a digital adoption platform will enhance. The digital transformation vision comes from the CEO which is then relayed to the C-suite and the middle managers, even where everybody in the organization buys into the vision, if it’s not backed up with an appropriate strategy, it will be just wishful thinking; it can never work.

The strategy is the most important thing that will make your vision work. Employees come up with resistance when they don’t understand your strategy; because of the simplicity of a digital adoption platform, your strategy becomes readily understandable due to the strategic guidance it gives to employees.

Your end goal becomes achievable without any iota of confusion. DAP enables you to save time and all other unnecessary conflicts you may have come across in your digital transformation project.

DAP ensures that you can effectively embark on your digital transformation initiatives by:

• Automating all aspects of an employee or customer onboarding
• Providing in-app software training and guidance
• Collecting and analyzing usage data
• Providing proactive support to solve any challenge your employees may encounter

Conclusion

The role of a digital adoption platform in the digital transformation era borders on benefits you can derive for your business; every business focuses on how to improve customer experience and hence, increase ROI. The digital adoption platform helps to reduce onboarding time, the burden on IT support, resistance from employees on new software technology, friction from employees, and builds higher morale across departments.

It enables you to understand what works and what does not work in real-time based on the insight you get from the integration of AI and machine learning.

Featured illustration: Freepik / Rawpixel

by Web Desk via Digital Information World