Doing digital transformation right

Investing in new technologies has become a critical way to maintain customers, keep your workforce connected, ensure business continuity, and develop new product and service offerings. 

If you’re considering investing in new technologies for your business, do you know how to ensure successful adoption and ROI? Do you have a plan so your investment delivers on expectations and gains buy-in from both employees and customers? 

Here are five key considerations to help you select and implement new technology solutions that can help your business build for the future.

The purpose of implementing technology is to solve a business problem. Before you investigate technology options, understand existing problems in your internal processes or workflows. 

Start with your employees. Ask about current tech roadblocks and how they felt about past tech solutions.

You’ll not only be able to pinpoint areas of opportunity but also will engage your stakeholders early in the process for a smoother rollout. 

Once you’ve identified a shortlist of challenges, begin investigating potential technology solutions. Identify and compare both the hard and soft costs for each option.

Hard costs are those directly related to the purchase of the technology. Aside from the purchase price for hardware, software and licenses, other hard costs can include: 

• Salaries for new IT employees who will manage and run the new technology.
• Prices for third-party contracts, including service agreements and consultant fees.
• Subscription fees for cloud service, data center or security.

Soft costs can include not only a temporary loss in productivity as employees learn the new technology but also:

• Costs for legal and compliance reviews.
• Expenses associated with training employees. 
• Costs associated with notifying employees and customers about a new process or tool.

Don’t forget to tap into the expertise of your banking partner to help prioritize investments based on cash flow and risk management. 

Purchasing and rolling out a new technology solution is not the sole responsibility of the IT department or the C-suite. It’s imperative that you engage employees continually throughout the process. 

Include stakeholders from across your organization to be the first to learn and test the new solution. These stakeholders will become your ambassadors, championing the change throughout your organization. 

Similar to the value in engaging employees, keeping your customers apprised of your new technology rollout is just as critical. Here are some strategies for engaging customers:

• Set clear expectations about the rollout and how customers will be affected.
• Explain what new tools or processes are available and how they can use them.
• Communicate all the benefits (not features) the new technology delivers to customers. 

Performance-oriented metrics aligned with company goals will help keep your technology rollout on track and keep you and your team accountable. Benchmarks for that rollout will keep your project organized and on schedule. 

Also, be sure you have mechanisms in place to source feedback and data that will help you understand where you are in achieving your metrics.

Consider establishing these types of success metrics:

• Operational metrics: How the technology performs to expectations and needs; its availability to all associated users; task efficiency; and user experience/satisfaction.
• Delivery metrics: How satisfied users are with the technology, the rollout and training process; how much efficiency was gained by the rollout.
• Service metrics: Availability of service relative to the service level agreement; number of service interruptions.
• Organizational metrics: Percentage of designated users who use the new technology appropriately; how well the technology solves the problems it is designed to solve; how well the technology increased customer engagement.
• Financial metrics: Actual costs compared to budgeted costs; savings delivered by the new technology; revenue growth associated with the implementation of the new technology.

It won’t be enough to prepare for the next normal after the pandemic by purchasing and rolling out new technology within your organization. 

Systematically organizing and implementing a technology sourcing and rollout plan will help you optimize your technology investment to ensure successful adoption and ROI.