One Journey, Three Paths: A Tale of Technology Adoption

Over the past 20 years, I have had the good fortune to work with some of the world’s biggest companies in the implementation of emerging digital marketing technology. Along the way, I have learned, through both successes and challenges, quite a few things about organizational adoption of new technology.

 

My biggest takeaway: Technology adoption is a journey.

Many businesses think that the journey is the exhaustive vendor review or RFP process and the selection of the software. They then deploy the software. The end.

Later on, they wonder, why didn’t it work as expected?  It is because technology adoption is a journey and the vendor selection is simply the prologue—the real journey lies ahead of this. The rollout is the starting gate with a vision of ending the journey with successful adoption and beneficial usage of the new technology.

In thinking about the journey, we need to think of the three different paths of the journey. These are being taken simultaneously and play equal parts to a successful conclusion—the path of the individual, the organization, and the platform.

 

The Path of the Individual

For the individual user, their path is one of ongoing learning and behavior change. Nobody picks up new software and immediately becomes an expert at it. Often the thought of using new software, no matter how beneficial, seems harder than just dealing with the known challenges it is meant to solve.

There is a continuum starting with first exposure, initial training, and first use. This is often the biggest struggle—getting started. Then, seeing others use and adopt the technology, hearing benefits other users are discovering, drives momentum. As their usage progresses and they start to gaining added proficiency, achieving success and ultimately changing their behavior to best benefit from the software.

 

The Path of the Organization

The path of an organization is a choice—a highly encouraged choice—that if taken, plays a powerful part in the journey’s successful ending.

For organizations that choose to take the path, the momentum begins as use cases are developed and training programs are implemented. Followed by communication programs to edify how, when, and why to use the software there is even more progression and leadership promotes usage through events and other communication platforms. The organization’s path has a profound impact on the many individual paths that are underway.

 

In the graph above, we have seen this play out many times where initial usage is light when smaller populations of users get initial training, and these individuals start their individual paths. Then usage slowly grows as the population of users grows and some of the earlier users gain more proficiency.

We see spikes driven by promotional events, leadership communication, special projects that demand the tech, etc. Following these major events, we see some drops in usage, but usage levels still far exceed from before the organization.

The organizational path is not an overnight success. It isn’t flip the switch and everyone is crushing. It is a gradual, but constantly progressing evolution of adoption and usage. It is critical in encouraging individuals down their path of a permanent change in behavior toward the universal journey of beneficial adoption.

 

The Path of Technology

Then there is the path of the technology. In the old days, this was a slow one, broken up into major software releases that might occur on a quarterly or semi-annual basis. Thankfully, in the world of AI, this has been transformed.

True AI systems are learning engines, improving every day based on their learnings from usage. The software will be smarter tomorrow than it is today. That remains true every day of this overall journey. While that is fundamentally a great, if not amazing thing, it also needs to be calibrated into the understanding of the other path’s that are going on simultaneously to lead everything

 

Three Paths, One Journey

When all three paths are traveled, intersecting, and time is taken to clean up any unforeseen roadblocks along the way, companies start seeing the paths connect and come together to drive the journey to successful completion. The true benefits of the technology not only are realized but continue to grow and strengthen.

If you are interested in tips on driving adoption or challenges to watch out for, I recently  shared some additional lessons learned during a recent webinar “The Promises and Pitfalls of Market Insights Platforms.”  Though focused on insights platforms, many strategies shared can be easily translated to other technology platforms.

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