The DAP Strategy: A New Way of Working to De-Risk & Accelerate Your Digital Transformation

INTRODUCTION

By 2025, 70% of organizations will use digital adoption solutions across the entire technology stack to overcome still insufficient application user experiences.

—Gartner, technology analyst firm¹

Predictions

It may be bold to begin a book with predictions of the future. But when the conditions for a tectonic shift in humanity arise, it lends itself to some crystal ball gazing. Before getting to my predictions, let’s highlight these tectonic shifts:

1. The way humanity is leaning on technology is resulting in a new way of working, be it from home or the office or en route. Consumers of technology are demanding a shift in how they experience technology.

2. Digital transformation programs are a reality across most organizations around the world. It’s this bias for change that has led organizations to commit vast amounts of resources in hopes of changing how consumers and employees engage with technology. For organizations, these transformations are a means of surviving and, in some cases, thriving.

3. By 2028, global software industry revenue will exceed $1 trillion.² This milestone will represent a watershed moment for us. Software will no longer be seen as a differentiator but rather as a staple. This will force us to rethink operating models so that business processes become liquid-like, simply flowing like water from a tap without friction or confusion. It simply works.

I believe in the power and potential of Digital Adoption Platforms (DAPs) to change the ways in which we work and live for the greater good. Of course, it’s easy for me to be a believer. I’ve seen it happen time and again in organizations around the world and have experienced the impacts personally and professionally over the past five years.

My goal with this book is to share experiences, anecdotes, and thoughts about DAPs and their power to help enable and drive change. If at times I’m confrontational, it’s because I want you to understand that for digital transformations to work, we need to embrace new ways of working; to challenge the norms and traditional approaches that are so ingrained in organizations today. The journey starts with the user, not the technology. To solve for the user will mean getting you closer to believing in DAPs too.

Today, organizations look to technology to solve for the disruption around them, the innovation they need to survive, and the transformation they need to thrive. The clever ones have learned from their flirtations with failure that, to improve their chances of success, they need a different approach in their digital transformation mindset. It will take a curious mind, one where the status quo is challenged almost daily.

This different approach is the DAP. The initial results from the past decade are encouraging, so much so that the leading analyst and global systems integrators are readying themselves for this next wave of DAP integrations. So far, we have seen wonderful stories where DAPs have impacted small clusters of humanity by making technology more accessible to users and resulting in better human outcomes. I will share some of these examples in the book.

But first, some of my predictions—past, present, and future:

2020: DAP is real and is mainstream

By 2020, many of the Fortune 10, 100, and 500 organizations will be exposed to a DAP solution. These would be used in a point solution or departmental process mindset, not necessarily across the entire organization in 2020-21. If your organization is not yet on the journey, you may want to keep reading because more than 3,000 organizations have already begun the journey to DAP.³

2021: Business & tech analyst firms legitimize DAP as a tech category

Gartner issues their magic quadrant for DAP, following the Everest Peak matrix, which was published in 2020.⁴ Other advisory firms follow suit with global system integrators building out practices to satisfy growing customer demand. Initially, the focus will be on content factories slowly evolving to provide a managed service around DAP analytics and advisory services for changes to an organization’s operating model.

2022: The DAP consultant becomes the new IT role

Organizations begin to look for new skills to support DAP content curation and insights efforts around Digital Adoption Platforms. A new gig economy emerges for content curators. The DAP Consultant becomes the new business analyst as organizations battle with new disruptors to defend their traditional markets. The DAP Consultant job title sees tens of thousands of job ads on talent platforms like LinkedIn.

2023: DAPs are a budget line item in most organizations

With new success stories and a greater spotlight on the critical importance of DAPs in Digital Transformation programs, organizations acknowledge the need by including a budget line item dubbed Digital Adoption under the office of the Chief Financial Officer or Chief Transformation Officer tied to cashable benefits.

2024: The DAP Center of Excellence emerges

Organizations accept that they need in-house core competence around DAP across all facets of the organization. They start to think about organization restructuring to test out new operating models where core capabilities remain in-house and less critical functions like enablement and content build are right-shored to a content factory.

2025: A Digital Adoption strategy becomes a core talent acquisition strategy

Digital employee experience becomes a top five question on a candidate’s decision criteria on whether to join the organization. Companies that do not have a legitimate answer will not merely struggle with first-day churn of new hires but will struggle to attract the right talent and skills because people will simply not want to come to work and put up with the complexity of work.

2026: A Digital Adoption Index emerges

Just like the Dow, a new index emerges that tracks the maturity of an organization’s digital adoption against financial outcomes. The correlation will suggest that organizations with a higher return on adoption outperform the market and their industry peers.

2027: The DAP dashboard becomes the pulse of an organization

CEOs and CIOs will use insights from the DAP dashboard as a compass to the health of their digital transformation. It will be used to hold technology vendors accountable for the value being realized from the tech investments and value realization from DAPs will be tied to cashable benefits from de-risking, accelerating, and maximizing operational and financial metrics from digital transformation programs.

It will be interesting to see how many of these predictions hold true. I suspect that some may arrive sooner than expected. But the reality is that DAPs have arrived. Even more interesting will be witnessing how DAPs impact humanity in the decade to come.

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1 Melissa Hilbert and Stephen Emmott, Improve Employee Usage, Engagement, and Productivity with Digital Adoption Solutions, Gartner Research, November 25, 2020, https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/3993544/improve-employee-usage-engagement-and-productivity-with-

2 Neeraj Agrawal and Logan Bartlett, Software 2019, Battery Ventures slideshow, May 2, 2019, https://www.slideshare.net/Battery_Ventures/software-2019.

3 Anil Vijayan, Sarath Hari N., and Rachita Mehrishi, Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) Products PEAK Matrix® Assessment with Technology Vendor Landscape 2020, Everest Group, July 20, 2020, https://www2.everestgrp.com/reportaction/EGR-2020-24-R-3855/Marketing.

4 Ibid.

CHAPTER 1

THE POWER OF HOW

In September 2019, intense bushfires begun to rage in many parts of Australia.⁵ Australians have become accustomed to the annual brushfire season that runs from roughly August through January. But due to a combination of unusually dry conditions and a lack of moisture in the soil, Australian authorities had alerted the public as early as June 2019 to prepare for an intense fire season.⁶

As it turned out, the 2019-20 season would prove to be catastrophic. So much so that it’s come to be known colloquially as the Black Summer.⁷

Intense fires rampaged vast swaths of the landscape throughout the continent, burning more than 70,000 square miles and leaving immense destruction in their wake.⁸

More than 450 million reptiles, birds, and mammals were estimated to have died between September 2019 and January 2020 alone, according to ecologists at the University of Sydney. The total estimated loss of animals was later revised to more than 1 billion.⁹ It is likely that whole species of animals and plants may have been wiped out completely.¹⁰

The fires also damaged or destroyed more than 5,900 buildings and around 3,000 homes.¹¹ According to estimates from the Insurance Council of Australia, losses due to bushfires between November 2019 and February 2020 totaled more than $1 billion (USD) in insured claims.¹² That doesn’t even take into account financial losses from the bushfires (lost income, reduced productivity) that are more difficult to tally. The Insurance Council of Australia, the country’s main industry body, announced that as of March 2021 more than 25,600 insurance claims worth about $385 million (USD $395 million) had been lodged in 2021 (as of the end of March) as a result of the fires and floods.¹³

The effects of diminished air quality from the fires were felt around the world. Australians were unable to go about the normal routine of their lives due to breathability issues. At least 33 people lost their lives.¹⁴

In January 2020, help seemed to arrive in the form of rain showers. At first, the rains helped to quell some of the fire across the continent. But as the rains continued to fall, they became their own form of natural disaster.

The heavens opened up prodigiously. Some parts of Australia saw more rain in just a few days in January 2020 than in all of 2019.¹⁵ Intense, continuous rains fell upon Australia, bringing immense, widespread flash flooding that resulted in yet more havoc in the form of property damage, power outages to more than 10,000 homes, and a muddy, fire ash runoff that spilled into rivers killing off untold numbers of fish.¹⁶

Then came the hailstorms. For a time, cricket ball-size hailstones pelted cities, towns, and the countryside throughout Australia.¹⁷ There were also fire tornadoes. Some meteorologists suggested that the intense heat from the bushfires had created their own weather systems, leading to one type of storm after another.¹⁸

And though Australians had no way of knowing it at the time, a global pandemic was right around the corner.

You couldn’t blame the average Australian for wondering if he or she saw the situation in more biblical terms, with themselves cast as a continent of modern-day Jobs.

Imagine for a moment that you’re John or Jane Doe. Your life has been impacted forever in some cases. As a result of the hailstorms, you don’t have a car to drive to work or to get your children to school because the windshield has been shattered. Imagine you have lost your home because it was destroyed by the bushfires. Or if your home managed to survive the blazes, it was rendered uninhabitable by floods.

You need the money from your insurance claim. In some cases, it represents a lifeline, a life preserver for many families; money to fix the family car that’s critical for your livelihood. You need the insurance money to repair your house and shelter your family. But when you call your insurance company, you simply can’t get through. You get a busy signal. Sometimes you get disconnected. At that moment, you feel helpless.

When you do manage to get through you wind up on hold listening to endless elevator music. Maybe, eventually, you get through. Most likely, you’re greeted by a recording—a pleasant voice inviting you to leave a message but offering no time frame when you can expect to have your call returned. If you do actually reach a human, invariably you’re put back on hold or transferred. More elevator music.

What you don’t get is help from your insurance company when you need it most. It’s not that your insurance company doesn’t want to help. It’s that they can’t. They’re paralyzed. They’re struggling to manage the growing volume of calls.

Insurance claims due to fire, flooding, and hail in Australia soared in 2019-20.¹⁹ There was not enough support staff to handle all the calls from desperate customers. Call times went up. Millions of people in Australia found themselves stranded, waiting for help.

We all know that basic business strategy suggests it makes good business sense to hedge your business risks. In this case, the insurance company would typically diversify its resource risk with a blend of off- and onshore resources. Not only does this facilitate the ability to scale its support needs, but the wage arbitrage makes perfect sense if the insurance company is trying to manage its cost-to-serve metrics.

Now, in any normal year this would have been a good decision for the insurance company to make. If not for the fact that right on the heels of the fires and the floods and the hail, the world was thrown into the chaos of the COVID-19 global pandemic.

The Philippines, a primary location for Australian companies to outsource customer service resources,²⁰ went into lockdown to curtail the spread of the virus in March 2020.²¹ This severely limited the country’s call center service industry’s ability to step up and help Australian companies scale capacity economically to meet their customers’ urgent needs.

It was in this historical moment, facing these difficult, compounding forces, that one Australian insurance company chose to rethink how they could rapidly bring new support center staff up to speed so they could begin helping customers. The company would leverage technology, of course, but it’s how they leveraged it that made the difference.

The insurance company didn’t use technology to onboard or train the new support center operators—instead, they used a Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) to introduce their people to an entirely new way of working.

My Errors in Judgment and My Road to Digital Redemption

In the autumn of 2016, and after four years, I left SAP, the global German Software company that I hold dear to my heart to this day. In my time there, I had the privilege of representing this colossal brand initially across the Asia Pacific region and then in Southeast Asia. I was doing what I loved. I was in front of customers and prospects, evangelizing all that cloud software (more specifically cloud HR software) promised an organization to carry out its business strategy.

Before my time at SAP, I’d split seven years between Automatic Data Processing (ADP) and NorthgateArinso, Inc., delivering on business outcomes rather than merely selling software. My strengths were in front of a whiteboard, painting the art of the possible, and challenging senior leaders to think about the day in the life of their customers. I loved challenging executives to become more curious about their organizations, their business processes, and their people.

But even then, I knew all my experience would count for nothing if I didn’t make a change. I had seen firsthand and had been complicit in perpetuating the problem. I was selling software without a clear understanding of how I would help the organizations buying the software realize the value of their investments. And the more software I sold, the bigger the problem I was helping to create. In my mind, we needed to sell and deliver on business outcomes, but we were falling short.

I realized that to be relevant in 2020 and beyond I needed to be part of the solution. And to be part of the solution—making technology deliver on its promise to companies and people—I needed to understand the problem firsthand. So, I did arguably the craziest thing I could do: I crossed over from being a software vendor to leading an HR digital transformation program for 26,000 employees