REPORTED
An article by the Corporate Executive Board (CEB), a research and advisory firm to leading organizations, stated that many companies in the Financial Services (FS) industry are increasing their investments in IT solutions, despite the volatile market conditions. What is shocking is that CEB reports,
“only 24% of the controllers we recently asked believe they are realizing positive returns.” CEB is advising organizations to get more value out of finance IT by upholding data standards, aligning IT investments with real business needs, and focusing on end-user adoption.”
Our View
At Success Chain, we have found that many firms do not have effective software adoption strategies. Effective Software Adoption programs focus on driving desired user behavior – such as how and when people use the technology, the actions they take to ensure data quality, the degree to which they follow defined business processes, and the actions they take to ensure compliance. The skills and methods required to drive effective Software Adoption are very different from those required to implement IT systems. Unfortunately, these are often missing from most IT implementation projects.
The CEB post indicates that only 24% of controllers believe that they realize positive returns on their investment. Based on this, consider:
The remaining 76% of organizations do not believe they are getting a positive return on investment. This is a ridiculously high percentage. Even in Vegas, you have a better shot of getting a positive return!
Would you make an investment if you only had a 1 in 4 chance of getting a positive result? Before making major IT investments, you should have a clearly defined strategy for when and how you will measure the ROI on your IT investment. What you will find is that Software Adoption is the biggest item on this critical path. What you will probably find is that you are not doing enough to maximize and sustain Software Adoption over the life of your system, and this is the leading cause of failed IT investments.
RECOMMENDATION – FOCUS ON SOFTWARE ADOPTION
Before investing in IT projects, make sure you have a clear Software Adoption Strategy that aligns user behavior and adoption of the IT system with your business goals and IT ROI needs. Further, you need to determine how you will implement your user adoption strategy and sustain your Software Adoption Program over the life of the system. Be sure to recognize that changes in the levels and effectiveness of user adoption (over time) will change the ROI you receive from your IT investment. Quite simply, whenever you stop measuring and driving effective user adoption, your IT investment is at risk.
Success Chain Can Help
Success Chain helps organizations maximize the ROI on their IT investments by developing and implementing software adoption strategies that maximize and sustain effective adoption over the life of the system. We conduct software adoption assessments, develop software adoption strategies, and provide hands-on software adoption program implementation services. Our Software Adoption Consulting and Training packages are designed to be fast and effective to enable our clients to achieve maximum software adoption results in record time with minimal effort.
If you’re a software buyer in need of in-depth help or just a quick review of your software adoption strategy and plans, then we have the right package for you. Contact us to learn more.
