Eagle Hill Consulting commissioned Ipsos to survey senior business leaders in early March. More than half said their organisation’s recent technology investments had failed to fully achieve their intended outcomes.
The most commonly cited reason was not cost, not vendor failure and not the technology itself. It was underestimating the impact of new technology on day-to-day work.
Only 35 per cent said their organisation had considered day-to-day work impacts before rolling the technology out. Roughly a third said the main reason the investment did not deliver was that people continued using legacy processes and workarounds.
That is the whole story of nearly every failed system implementation, told in two sentences by the people who commissioned them.
The money bought a capability. What was needed was a change in what people do at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday, and nobody bought that, because it does not have a price list.
Anyone who has installed a new till system in a busy shop has lived this. The system is better. It is genuinely better, and the demonstration was convincing. Then it meets a Saturday lunchtime, and the regular who always pays half cash and half card, and the item that gets rung through as something else because the correct button is three screens deep, and the staff member who has worked out that it is faster to write the order on a pad and enter it later. Within a month a parallel system exists, made of paper and habit, running quietly underneath the expensive one. Every number the new system produces is now wrong, and nobody upstairs knows.
The workaround is not laziness. It is the staff solving a real problem, in real time, with the tools they have. The moment the official process costs more effort than the unofficial one, the unofficial one wins, every time, in every organisation on earth.
Eagle Hill’s description of what the successful organisations do differently is worth repeating exactly. They start with the work rather than the technology. They measure changed behaviour rather than usage alone. And they manage adoption as an ongoing discipline instead of a one-time project.
The middle item is the sharpest. Usage statistics are the most comforting and least informative number in any rollout. People logging in says nothing about whether the work changed. It is entirely possible for a system to show full adoption while the actual business runs on a spreadsheet somebody maintains at home.
One executive quoted alongside the research described classifying an artificial intelligence programme as a change management initiative rather than an IT deployment before asking for budget, and treating the technology selection as the last decision rather than the first.
That ordering is the entire finding. Most organisations choose the tool, then discover the work.
Half of them then report that the tool did not deliver.
Source: Human Resources Director, “Why do technology investments fall short?”
