The Digital Transformation Age: How Important Is Digital Adoption?

Digital transformation involves using technology to optimize existing processes, culture, and customer experience to meet changing market and business requirements. It can also include creating new processes altogether.

The exponential growth of software applications makes it quicker for companies to purchase new software but has also increased the need for effective adoption and usage. Technology alone does not make employees productive, but effective on boarding and digital adoption improve productivity.

Before companies can see a return on their investment in technology, they must leverage technology to update processes, fully utilize digital tools and new software, and improve interaction with customers and employees. That makes digital adoption an essential part of business success.

Do you want to maximize technology to improve your ROI? Digital adoption is the way out, and you’ll learn how to utilize it in this article.

What Is Digital Adoption?

Digital adoption is when an individual can utilize software, tools, or applications to their fullest capacity and carry out specific digital procedures successfully.

It’s a change and learning mechanism that enables individuals to understand the potential of digital resources, utilize them to achieve their goals, and fully leverage technology to optimize processes and drive innovation.

However, digital adoption occurs when individuals are onboard with software applications’ advanced features and understand digital processes’ benefits, roles, and functionality.

A User’s Digital Adoption Journey

Users become power users once they achieve digital adoption. That’s beyond merely adopting the software. Software adoption involves learning to use new software, while digital adoption is learning to use the software to transform how you do business.

How can users know they have achieved digital adoption?

It’s simple. Users need to understand the following to unlock the potential of new technology:

• Why is the technology or application required in the first place?
• How will it be helpful for business processes?
• How can processes be optimized with these tools?
• How can we change processes to utilize the technology?
• How can we achieve end goals with the technology?

Once users can answer the above questions, they have achieved digital adoption.

Why Is Digital Adoption Needed Now?

Technological advancements have recently modified how individuals and companies conduct business. Organizations are more interested in enhancing performance and optimizing business processes to maximize ROI with new tools and applications.

These changes often occur after an organization goes through a digital transformation. However, an organization must understand its various departments’ cultural and technical needs for a successful transition.

Organizations can also aid smooth transition through online training, classroom training, documentation, knowledge transfer, and digital adoption platforms.

Why Is Digital Adoption Important?

Over the last three years, businesses have met unforeseen disruptions and challenges, which forced organizations to take the digital route. A recent survey reveals that more than 65% of the world’s economy is digital. Also, experts project that the digital transformation investment will hit $6.8 trillion by 2023.

Besides, the rate at which organizations acquire software has drastically increased over the last few years. The new-age applications promote agility, productivity, efficiency, and improvement in ROI. 

However, 37 percent of software spending by organizations is a waste. The cost of unused software is about $30 billion in the United States alone. This stat shows the underutilization of most organizations’ software stacks. The problem is not the software but its usage.

Consequently, organizations must create an effective digital adoption strategy to help them maximize their software stack’s potential and maximize ROI. Also, An effective digital adoption strategy will:

• Help employees focus on their job.
• Ensure quicker onboarding and training.
• Eliminate the need to memorize the steps needed to achieve a task.
• Boost the software adoption rate.
• Help organizations maximize their application’s stack.
• Help organizations stay competitive.

You must bring DAPs (Digital Adoption Platforms) into the picture to achieve the items in the list above. DAP is an intelligent tool that helps seamlessly accomplish an organization’s digital transformation. Most DAP products offer on-screen guidance in web-based applications. 

Besides, as applications update, trainers and admins must retrain each individual. DAP solutions can help reduce dependencies, smoothen the onboarding process, save time and money, and improve employee productivity. It also provides a better user experience via analytics.

The Real Drivers in Digital Transformation

A recent publication by IDC shows that culture, knowledge, and people are the main drivers of digital transformation. And so, an essential element a company needs to guarantee scalability and sustainability is to invest in people and their digital know-how.

Before investing in digital transformation projects, ensure your company has a clear digital adoption strategy to aid your workforce’s compliance with the new Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) accompanying the transition.

Again, DAP becomes an essential tool that guarantees productivity and a better employee experience via interactive guidance and analytics.

Digital Transformation Security Concerns

Digital certificates are essential for securing internet traffic. They ensure confidentiality, integrity, authenticity, and online communications’ non-repudiation in public-facing online services, machine-to-machine communications, internal services, API integrations, and public cloud services.

However, many organizations have little or no visibility and control over their certificates. This issue allows securing lapses since TLS certificates are essential for the protection and integrity of a host of e-business functions.

What’s the root of the problem? Many businesses lack full and frequently updated certificate inventories. Consequently, certificates take the IT admins by surprise and cause outages and disruptions of online services and communications when they expire. These disruptions tarnish the company’s brand, affect sales, and hurt partner and customer satisfaction.

Also, many organizations rely on manual processes for managing certificates via spreadsheets, yielding errors and outdated information. Besides, a manual approach limits the inventory to certificates the IT department knows and will lack unreported certificates available in your environment.

The Ponemon Institute also reveals that it costs the average Global 5000 company about $15 million to recover from the business loss caused by the certificate-related outage while losing another $25 million to compliance-related issues.

Proper certificate management will help organizations reduce the risk of breaches and unplanned outages and effectively protect their digital assets. Here, SSL certificates can be of many types. 

Monitoring several certificates used to secure your domain and subdomains can be stressful. Using a Wildcard SSL Certificate can help protect your domain and unlimited subdomains, reducing the certificates to one. And unlike when you have to get a new certificate for every subdomain, monitoring the certificate becomes easier.

Fortunately, you can automate and centralize the tracking of global certificate deployments and your visibility with a tool designed for hybrid IT environments.

Wrapping Up

People find comfort in what they are familiar with, which explains why some employees stick to existing workflows. Moreover, some customers are unwilling to learn new ways to interact with a business.

Digital adoption is the way forward. It’ll help overcome such a steep learning curve, break through barriers associated with push-back, and make anyone proficient with a new digital process without strenuous training.

Also Read: What Are The Benefits Of Computer Application Technology?