The pattern repeats. The barrier to organisations leveraging new technology is not the technology’s performance or their people’s ability to learn; it’s investment in adoption, the change management to help people with transition.
The technology looks great. The vendor has promised it works right out of the box and that it is so simple to use everyone can take it up. Your organisation invested a fortune to buy it and integrate it. After the fanfare of launch day, nothing happens. Nobody is using the fancy new kit. Executives begin to mumble about the vendor or the project team or both. The CIO waves his hands and says the tech works. The CPO invests more communications to promote the tech. Nothing changes.
Your people work hard. They have invested a lot in their current work practices, they work and they know their performance will be measured. Any form of change usually involves a productivity cost where employees go from expert in one system to a beginner in another. Resistance to an experience of loss of productivity at first is rational. For some systems, like CRM, data, or collaboration systems, the payoff in benefits may be some time down the path or payoff to others further weakening the rewards of take-up.
New technologies can also face rational resistance because they cut across organisational values that are deeply entrenched. If knowledge is power in your organisation, sharing knowledge will take culture change. If expertise is how people are promoted, don’t expect enthusiasm for technology like AI that scrambles the path to better jobs. These cultural barriers can be subtle but deeply entrenched. They need a change program to address the fears and communicate that the organisation will value and reward new behaviours.
Adoption can also play a key role in realising the larger benefits of technology. Too often given new technology we consider it only incrementally, squeezing it in at the edges, looking for incremental gains and growing frustrated that it is one more thing to do. Taking the time to have deep adoption conversations with your employees will identify the areas where work can be transformed by new technology, where the benefits can be larger than increments of productivity, potentially even new revenue and lines of business Those rewards just don’t happen. They need to be wrung out and supported.
So next time you are implementing new technology of any kind, invest a little more into your support for employee’s adoption. You will see far better results.
And adoption is continuous, it doesn’t stop once the training has ended, it includes any future changes whether people (roles and responsibilities), processes and technology changes.
Raise your hand (enterprise workers) if you want change! Crickets. Same as it ever was.