Digital Transformation vs. Digital Adoption
We are always being told that most digital transformation (DX) projects fail, yet we are able to take Ubers, transfer vast sums of money on our phones, and meet virtually with customers or colleagues in Dubai, Rotterdam, and Lagos all in one pixel-perfect screen.
Somehow, all these failed projects changed our lives forever, and at a speed that is still difficult to grasp.
Organisations want to invest in “failure” with global spending on DX forecast to almost double from $1.8 trillion currently to $3.4 trillion in 2026.
The concept of DX has become so all-encompassing, that it is difficult for organisations to define success or failure. To do a better job at setting expectations, and executing DX projects, it was necessary to parse “digital transformation” and differentiate between the processes and disciplines that are key to a positive outcome.
The most important of these are change management, which defines and monitors the objectives of DX, and digital adoption, which makes sure that DX is accepted and practised throughout the organisation.
In this blog, we discuss Digital Transformation vs. Digital Adoption, in part because the terms themselves are open to misinterpretation but most importantly, because such an analysis tells us new and interesting things about both.
We shall begin by describing the concepts of DX and digital adoption. What is the relationship between them? What solutions are out there to help you achieve transformational change? Taking a step back, we shall also answer the following questions: “Do we even need more DX? Aren’t the developed economies digitally saturated?”
We close with a brief discussion of the DX and digital adoption solutions offered by Dyanix which will further help to bring out the distinctions between them.
What is digital transformation?
DX is not merely the effort of making business processes more efficient and more profitable; it represents real and irrevocable change. One way of describing such a transformation would be to say that DX is the shift from manual to digital – from purchasing a CD in a shop to ordering it online and then (doing away with the physical object altogether) streaming it to your mobile device.
This was absolutely the case during the first wave of DX which set out to accomplish the huge task of “translating” analogue data such as documents and photographs into digital formats. This process is far from over; there is still a need for organisations to automate paper-based processes, and Covid revealed gaps in digitisation as access to important analogue archival material was suddenly cut off.
Digitalisation – the next phase of DX – leverages digital technology to change workflow processes and business models. Where digitisation allowed us to view our bank statements online, digitalisation paves the way for bank transfers, contactless payments, and much else.
This points to another aspect of DX. Organisations have been implementing digital change for more than 20 years without knowing what technological advances were around the corner, particularly the cloud. This led to a build-up of different systems, data sources, and workflow processes which have created new points of friction. Many “modern” DX projects are created to clear up the mess of decades of unimpeded innovation.
The average midsize business uses 137 different SaaS apps – a crowded and often confusing digital landscape, both for IT and for the end-users.
What is digital adoption?
It stands to reason that if your transformative solutions are not accepted by your workforce, or not used adequately, the outcome of your DX initiatives will be disappointing, as has so often been the case.
The insight that DX is about much more than technology became a dynamic and indispensable part of the process itself: digital adoption.
Alongside the so-called digital skills gap – the shortage of software developers, data scientists and so on – the biggest obstacle to an effective outcome of DX initiatives is resistance to change.
It took organisations a while to figure this out. For a long time, the thinking was: “DX makes life easier for everyone so why would you resist it?”.
A close cousin of digital transformation is digital disruption and for every success story such as Uber or Netflix, there are countless businesses that didn’t make it because they failed to confront the technological and cultural challenges of DX.
For this reason, the first task of digital adoption must be to prepare the workforce for change with a narrative that stresses the positives, acknowledges disruption, and maps out a clear plan to upskill the workforce.
DX adds value because it gives customers a better experience by removing “pain points” in their engagement with you; it also releases your workforce from the drudgery of manual tasks, outdated software, complex workarounds, and business processes stuck in traffic jams of apps and passwords.
Digital adoption should be aimed at leveraging the experience (and also the soft skills) of your workforce, rather than their perseverance with un-automated and un-competitive workflows.
Another interpretation of the term “digital adoption” reflects the market or segment penetration of digitalised capabilities. For example, digital adoption in Italy is markedly higher than in Belgium. And in terms of sector segmentation, digital adoption in the German public sector significantly lags behind healthcare.
This is clearly not the same as the digital adoption that is necessary to make a success of DX initiatives, yet it does tell us what opportunities there are in different markets, and the likely direction of further investment.
We do not have the scope here to survey the breadth of those opportunities in the Americas and Asia but will focus instead on the EMEA markets.
Digital opportunities in EMEA markets
Europe, the Middle East, and Africa are at different stages of their digital development but what they have in common is the huge potential upside of extending DX efforts.
Europe
A recent study argues that digitalisation across the European Union could unlock an additional €2.8 trillion in economic value by 2030. To achieve this, the European Commission has set itself some ambitious targets, which include 75% of EU companies deploying cloud services, and digitising 100% of core public services.
The cloud, in particular, is pivotal. The Commission calculates that moving 10% of government IT systems to the cloud would save European taxpayers €900m a year. This aspiration may seem modest yet presents a formidable technological and cultural challenge because the public sector probably more than any other is weighed down by legacy, both in terms of systems and ingrained ways of working.
The Commission flags up digital adoption as the largest obstacle to success, with just 61% of the EU’s working population expected to have basic digital skills by 2030.
Middle East
Digital adoption in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt is broadly in line with leading European and American economies but there are pockets of difference. What stands out is that DX in Middle Eastern markets is oriented towards mobile, with end-users 1.6 times more likely to engage on mobile apps than in Europe and North America, where websites still dominate. The largest untapped segment in the region is Egypt, where 31m of its residents lack internet access.
However, the picture is not monochrome. Digital adoption in the healthcare, grocery, and apparel segments is noticeably more advanced in Egypt than in the UAE, perhaps reflecting the importance of Dubai’s shopping mall culture.
The Middle East is a young, vibrant, and confident market – and much more optimistic than European and North American populations about the impact of emerging technologies such as AI and hyper-personalisation.
The Middle Eastern segment is ripe for change, and rife with opportunities for digital initiatives.
Africa
The continent is on the eve of a digital explosion. It is home to 19 of the top 20 fastest-growing countries in the world and by 2025, more than half of Africa’s population will be under 25. Generational shifts are a massive driver of digital adoption.
Africa’s tech sector is agile and innovative. A striking example of this is the digital mass payment platform built in just 10 days by the Togolese government at the start of the pandemic. The platform allowed beneficiaries to enrol and receive direct cash transfers within 120 seconds via basic mobile phones—without internet access.
Big Tech wants in on the action and Google recently announced a $1 billion investment in Africa over five years.
Africa’s relative digital immaturity is also an advantage because its businesses are much less weighed down by legacy IT. The next generation of digital innovations and tech successes could well come from Africa – and businesses such as Google are beginning to wake up to that fact.
Digital Transformation vs. Digital Adoption
Digital adoption is that part of DX where the adoptees – that is to say, you and your colleagues – work hard every day to make that transformation real and amplify it through continuous improvement.
If there is no DX project, there is no digital adoption – clearly. However, expensive technological interventions cannot reach their desired or expected outcome unless you make digital adoption a priority. This is what the European Commission warned about when it observed that all its forecasts of digitally driven growth would come to nothing if the EU workforce did not acquire basic digital skills.
These skills (or lack of them) are just the tip of the iceberg, as organisations struggle to embed change culturally and overcome the resistance of their workforce.
The shift from face-to-face sales to eCommerce in the business-to-business (B2B) sector is a prime example. If you automate transactions by moving them online, what happens to your sales reps? Will they lose out in commission or face redundancy? These are genuine fears, which will harm morale if they are not addressed sensitively. Here digital adoption is the conversation about a new role for sales reps, one where they leverage their deep insight into your products and customer base by intervening meaningfully at different touchpoints in the customer journey, not as hard-nosed salesmen but more as consultants.
For our next example, let’s look at the digital adoption of a particular piece of software, the popular Workday platform. One of the pillars of DX is optimisation and automation which Workday provides for HR and other business functions.
A lot needs to happen before the Workday front-end hits the screens of your colleagues in HR. Once the decision has been made to implement Workday, the platform has to be integrated with core business systems, and data siloes have to be overcome to feed accurate, complete, and often real-time data to the platform. The organisational aspect of this is part of change management which is also responsible for drawing up and implementing the timeline for digital adoption.
HR has to be trained in the software. Acceptance will be accelerated if the workforce can quickly see the immediate benefits (automation) and the long-term value (for instance, the reputational boost of an intuitive and frictionless onboarding process).
Next-generation software solutions such as Workday are powerful and hugely customisable so it is important to shield end-users from too much complexity. Defining user profiles is part of digital adoption. How accurate you are in customising access will only be revealed through tracking how Workday is being used. Monitoring Workday usage also gives insight into what can be improved and where additional training may be needed.
It is important to analyse DX and digital adoption in terms of the distinctive tools you need for each – and this is the subject of our next section.
How Dyanix supports DX
Dyanix is the European leader in digitisation. As digital adoption is much less prominent in this space, it falls outside the scope of our discussion. For a full review of our digitisation consultancy, scanners, software, and service contracts, please explore the hardware section of our website.
For your digitalisation projects, Dyanix offers several solutions, below we highlight two of these solutions: a no-code automation platform and a digital workspace. We shall look at these two tools in more detail.
Triggre
No-code is an accelerator of DX because it allows businesses to build custom apps at great speed without writing a line of code or taking up the valuable time of in-house developers. That is the power of Triggre, the latest transformational platform in the Dyanix portfolio of DX solutions.
The Triggre no-code platform brings agility to the necessary task of digitalising manual processes or replacing outdated software with custom apps. “Development” with Triggre takes a fraction of the time compared with projects that require extensive coding. Triggre returns power and creativity to the true experts: the people who need custom apps to transform their workflows.
Businesses of every kind can create web applications by visually mapping their processes, digitalising them, replacing their legacy systems, and thus driving innovation and growth.
The Triggre transformation is further expedited with ready-to-go application templates along with automatic testing that ensures there are no bugs, again saving valuable time.
Triggre is a prime example of a start-up leveraging innovation – no-code – to create a digital game-changer and simplify working practices across many organisations.
Workspace365
The triumph of the cloud led to the proliferation of apps and SaaS solutions that, individually, offer shortcuts and time savings, but as they begin to clump together are an obstacle to digital transformation. The typical organisation uses well over 100 cloud-based apps; workflows that span five, six, or more systems and apps are the rule rather than the exception. We have all felt the frustration of navigating between different apps and systems to complete a task. Our PCs are plastered with PostIt notes with different logins and passwords that we have to update regularly. While this is always wasteful and annoying, in the healthcare sector, even the briefest delay can have critical repercussions.
Workspace365 minimises “digital sprawl” by assigning a personalised and tailored digital workspace to each user based on their role or responsibilities. By allocating software only where it is needed, organisations save on licensing costs. Giving users a single log-in to complete a workflow across a range of tools enhances productivity and makes the experience coherent and enjoyable.
Workspace365 is a textbook example of a DX project that takes the gains of your previous transformative initiatives to the next level.
How does Dyanix support digital adoption?
Apty
Apty is a highly intuitive Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) that helps users over the threshold of change by giving them empathetic, personalised, and real-time training in a new technology or workflow. It is proven to speed up adoption by up to 300%.
To stick with our Workday example, how would Apty speed up and improve its adoption?
First, its AI engine would continuously analyse Workday usage in real-time to identify where and who needs help. If you have implemented a five-step process for creating a new job position in Workday, Apty might show you that most users get stuck on step three, and you would then provide suggestions on how this problem could be overcome.
When a process breaks down, its likely cause is people not knowing how to use Workday, especially in the early stages of adoption. Apty counters this with personalised and on-screen guidance that walks users through the process step-by-step, responding to their actions in real-time.
Apty always knows what step users are on and continues with its real-time guidance even if the process takes them out of Workday into another application.
Apty administrators can customise all the support content in Apty without writing a line of code; they can deploy a new workflow in a matter of minutes. Content can be published in any required format; workflows can be converted into multiple formats such as PDF, PowerPoint, video, web page, or – to leave the Workday context for a moment – to shareable content modules for a Learning Management System.
No DX project is wholly effective from day one. However, without granular insight into how well people are adapting to change, organisations will struggle to optimise performance – and hit their full DX brief. This is what makes Apty indispensable.
Dyanix is an active partner in DX projects and their successful adoption. The no-code platform Triggre is an exciting game-changer that allows businesses to build custom apps to replace obsolete software. Our other DX solution, Workspace365, helps organisations simplify workflows that are fragmented across a multitude of apps and systems. Digital adoption is key to the effectiveness and ROI of your DX investment. The Digital Adoption Platform Apty is a world leader in getting the best out of your workforce and the technologies that will help them serve your customers faster and better. If you would like to talk about any of our DX and digital adoption solutions, we are here for you!
