It's not merely buying technology, leveraging that technology is the key!

Adopting new technology can be considered one of the pillars of progressive thinking, however, next crucial step is to effectively leverage the technology to drive value for customers, business, stakeholders, technology users and enhance their capabilities. This can be achieved by:

•    Choosing tech with internal/external customer focus
• ·   Planning effective change management to increase adoption and usage of tech through a focus on varying learning needs by a group of users such as age, preference, impact on their work etc.
•    Planning for lag effect and investing in building readily available resources and tools to support learning and adoption and a greater focus on users who have no willingness to adopt
•    Being open-minded to bring in new talent to help and support the transition

From my finance transformation journeys I remember two cases of gross margin financial planning implementation where the client wanted to opt new tech to drive more efficiency and accuracy in the financial forecast. The first implementation was for a fortune 500 company where the project started with a great vision from leadership to build state-of-the-art forecasting solution. We delivered per client expectation but learned after a while that application is being used as a data repository to collect data from users offline excel models!

In the second case, we were hired by a mid-sized manufacturing company, again, to build a driver-based forecast model for gross margin. Here too we built per client’s expectation but, learned from the previous case, we proceeded to release with a lingering doubt in our minds whether the system will be used to its full extent by end-users. A few months after the release we got to know that the client was using the application as expected and told us that they are realizing 50% increase in forecast efficiency and 35% increase their forecast accuracy overall!

Contrast in these results startled us and we dug deeper to understand why and learned that in the first case leadership engagement was limited to the kick-off of the project and the broader vision was not shared with an analyst who worked on the ground level and users were not provided resources to enhance their learning of tech or a process that ultimately resulted in implementation is a failure.

In the second case, there was much higher attention to change management and communication to share the vision and new business processes. In addition to that, users were provided resources to learn a new tool and new business processes and, in some cases, teams were realigned to operate better with a new planning approach. All these efforts made the implementation and tech adoption much more successful.

The bottom line is vision alone is not sufficient. Proper planning, change management, training, and communication are required to help make tech adoption successful.

Hence, 5 Ps go a long way: “Proper Planning Prevents Poor Performance!”

Cheers!

Rahul S.