Digital innovations have enabled corporations to scale to levels that were once unimaginable. Despite the residual uncertainties from the global pandemic, one thing we are sure of is that digitized business is here to stay.
Ambitious finance leaders and teams continue to integrate technology into their operations to fill the need for faster, more accurate processes. In many cases, the effort to digitize the finance function can be met with the friction of low internal adoption. If the finance team cannot fully leverage their digital investments, it will be difficult to capture results. By gaining insight into how digital tools are utilized, finance leaders can appropriately enforce change management to encourage greater internal adoption.
The Importance of Adoption Insight
Guaranteeing the adoption of your digital investments largely depends on how easy the tool is to use and if it complements the finance team’s current workflows. The right technology will not require that your team change their workflow but rather support how they work with enhanced efficiency and accuracy. Without the right technology and a strategic plan for deployment, onboarding and training staff can be cumbersome and ultimately delay returns. These issues can stem from weak onboarding practices or a digital skills gap that frustrates employees and results in low adoption rates.
To address such issues, companies will need to increase employee usage, engagement, and overall productivity. Which leads to the question, how can finance leaders gauge the adoption and satisfaction of a digital tool? Finance leaders can track and report on their team’s usage over time and leverage the insights to improve adoption.
Employing Real-Time Analytics
Data must be understood and available in real-time to offer actionable insights. The following questions can help finance leaders and teams measure digital adoption:
- Which fully adopted solutions are moving numbers?
- Which of these new tools stand to benefit the organization most?
- Which underused solutions could benefit from increased adoption?
- Where in the process are users becoming confused or dropping off?
Tying Digital Initiatives to Business KPIs
Once leadership knows which digital tools are driving efficiency and which are no longer useful, the next step is to tie usage directly to business KPIs. Without this visibility, teams cannot measure their success. Finance leaders play an integral role in ensuring adoption by identifying how goals will be impacted and the best methods for tracking progress.
By following this approach, deploying new systems becomes less nebulous and directly connects the project to tangible outcomes. One of the most important KPIs for measuring adoption is how quickly employees onboard and understand the new tool. Finance leaders can gauge this by an employee’s ability to use the application efficiently and effectively. If the finance team struggles to adopt the technology, there may be a knowledge gap. This can be resolved with better training. Work alongside your technology vendor to establish an onboarding process that streamlines adoption and sets usage expectations. The onboarding process should be designed to include opportunities that add value, guarantee ROI, scale automation, support in-house BI tools, and train the team for success.
Rushing Digital Adoption Can Delay Wins
Digitizing the finance function is an evolving process that requires active engagement from all team members. Finance leaders can offer leadership by understanding the technical and financial implications. The level of employee satisfaction with new technology will be evident when measuring productivity, support tickets, user retention, and time spent using the software. By tracking usage details and troubleshooting issues, finance leaders can maximize the value of their digital tools and capture the best return on their investments of time, effort, and money.
Learn how your finance team can benefit from easy to use workflows and real-time data dashboards by scheduling a demo with an OpenEnvoy expert today, visit https://openenvoy.com/contact-us/.
