Navigating the Tech Maze: Measuring Tool Adoption in an Era of Expanding Stacks
Businesses are constantly adding new tools to their technology stack, and despite financial pressure, tech stacks are still growing. The sheer volume of applications can be overwhelming, from communication and collaboration platforms to specialized sales, marketing, project management software and innovative AI add-ons. While these tools promise increased efficiency and productivity, their true value hinges on one crucial factor: adoption. Are employees using the tools they're provided? And if not, what's holding them back?
The Challenge of the Expanding Tech Stack
It's no secret that a well-equipped team has access to a wide range of tools to enable collaboration, automate processes, and support productivity from anywhere. However, the proliferation of software solutions can lead to a fragmented experience. Employees may feel lost in a sea of applications, unsure of which tool to use for which task. This can result in underutilizing valuable resources, decreased efficiency, and a lower return on investment. A 2024 WalkMe report found that enterprise-size businesses lost a whopping $104M due to underutilized tech, disjointed strategy, and low adoption.
In this blog, we address the impact of a growing tech stack causing data silos, another obstacle organizations face with fragmented technology. The cognitive overload of switching between apps, the time wasted searching for information, and the potential for errors when data is scattered across different platforms can significantly impact productivity at your organization.
To address these challenges, training is not just a nice-to-have; it’s a must when implementing another software solution. Ensuring employees understand the why behind a tool and taking the time early on to get them up to speed can be a huge time-saver and contribute significantly to adoption. Ongoing training is also helpful to existing team members to fill gaps and ensure a streamlined approach. For new employees, training on expectations for using tools and best practices is also required.
Training takes various forms—live workshops, online tutorials, and quick reference guides, to name a few. Tailoring training to different roles and levels of technical proficiency within your organization is critical. In some cases, it may make sense to offer refresher courses or a dedicated help desk.
When team members understand why and how to adopt the tools provided, organizations can maintain consistency in utilization and recognize process, reporting, and performance efficiencies while maximizing ROI.
Beyond Implementation: The Importance of Measuring Adoption
You’ve selected new tech and trained your team, but simply providing the tools and guidelines is not enough. Organizations must actively measure tool adoption to understand how effectively their technology investments are utilized. What good is a solution if you don’t understand its use? Misused or unused tools only slow down your employees and managers and your organization's overall growth, making everything you do that much more difficult. Adopting core tools organization-wide can speed up access to critical data and improve productivity.
Combining implementation with data intelligence is the key to understanding and ensuring user adoption, gaining insight into employee behavior, and managing overall productivity. Several metrics can be used to measure adoption, including quantitative metrics like login frequency and feature usage and qualitative metrics like employee feedback or surveys.
By aggregating data from your core business tools, Prodoscore provides objective and measurable insight into how the tools you’ve invested in are being used. The data enables organizations to visualize whether new tools are being adopted, who your power users are, best practices, potential red flags or bottlenecks, and who may continue to rely on an outdated solution without being invasive or disrupting workflow. It can answer questions like, “On what days and weeks are employees working with certain tools? How frequently are they collaborating throughout a week or month? Which tools make up the largest part of employees’ workday?” In addition to highlighting ROI, training gaps, and best practices, this data creates accountability and transparency.
Driving Adoption and Maximizing ROI
The success of your business technology stack is defined by whether or not your staff is adopting your preferred solutions. Adding an adoption metric ensures everyone works with the same tools towards the same goals.
By gauging usage, businesses can identify gaps in training, uncover hidden bottlenecks, and make data-driven decisions to optimize their tech stack on an ongoing basis. If adoption for a particular solution peaks early in the process, there’s always time for it to dip, new employees may struggle, and other shiny tools may gain traction. Regularly auditing tech solutions can mitigate wasted spend and time and help companies and teams stay aligned on common goals. Plus, when there’s an opportunity to simplify or automate technology and processes, businesses tend to have more time for innovation and optimization - a win-win.
Your team members may require a more tangible explanation of why adoption and streamlined utilization matter. In those cases, user-friendly documentation can help, as can offering incentives for using critical tools, showcasing success stories companywide, and providing a feedback loop for continuous improvement.
Prodoscore integrates with dozens of popular workplace tools and apps to create a complete picture of your team’s engagement. This allows you to identify emerging opportunities, enhance coaching, improve employee performance, and focus on enhancing your team’s productivity to propel your business to new heights.
