How to Flatten the Application User Adoption Curve?

How to Flatten the Application User Adoption Curve?
Written by Mavim

USER ADOPTION

Every large IT rollout has an elephant in the room: user adoption. There are some great applications out there, from the smallest server closet to the mightiest cloud. But every one of them—database infrastructure, ERP implementations, even the simplest of CRM systems—has a learning curve.

That matters. Because no application succeeds without getting the people who’ll use it on board. Showing them how it’ll make their work easier, their day less frustrating, their daily tasks less likely to make them leap out of the window to their death. But user adoption isn’t easy. In fact, it’s why 8 out of 10 large rollouts fail.

The process experts at Mavim believe they have the answer—and it’s not some random buzzword-of-the-month, but their purpose for over 20 years.

 

Making processes part of everyone’s life

All businesses are a mass of interlocking, interacting processes. You could even say those processes are the organization—because the way they transform inputs into outcomes are the whole reason the organization exists, the source of all competitive advantage (and weakness). Yet it’s surprising how few companies understand their processes in detail.

Mavim does process mining. Mapping out those processes and how they interact, so people can understand how their actions affect the broader flow of business and (hopefully) work together to improve them. Mavim’s not the only one doing this, of course.

But first, Mavim is cloud-based, on Microsoft’s Azure platform—and teaming beautifully with other Microsoft applications like Visio. That’s the first phase of its attack on the user adoption curve: work with applications your customer uses already. It means process mining has a user base, even if they don’t know it yet.

 

Microsoft Business Intelligence: in the Magic Quadrant

So “familiar tools” is the first goal in driving the adoption that makes your rollout a success. But that doesn’t mean doing things the way they’ve always been done. In fact, you need to innovate harder. Mavim makes use of Microsoft BI—the business intelligence application that’s in the stratosphere of innovation, at the upper right of Gartner’s “Magic Quadrant” of products poised for major growth to answer market conditions.

With so many companies on Microsoft platforms anyway, and even more moving to the cloud, Microsoft BI ensures a fast startup for any process mining implementation. In Mavim’s case, that means more than mapping processes; it means seeing them in situ, connecting to actual transactions within the business in real time. Not a static map—a living, throbbing, pulsing network.

 

Digital Twin Organization: What-If to your heart’s content

While it’s great to be in the Magic Quadrant, it can be lonely at the top—and solving this is Mavim’s main show. Because when you can see how transactions really happen within your organization, you can plan improvements—using your process map as a “digital twin” of your organization, with all your ideas and What-If scenarios factored in to see how efficiently you could be working. Giving you a Target Operational Model to work towards.

It’s how you see where eight variants of a process (or eight hundred) should be streamlined into one. Or a process with too many steps cut down to size. Or one successful process rolled out more widely. And these innovations deliver that data in familiar formats—applications your people use already, like Visio; not arcane custom software used by few and understood by fewer. That’s where the strongest user adoption happens.

 

Conclusion: the best innovation happens on a solid base

So that’s how you make process mining a success: get everyone onboard. Doing it involves innovation in the user experience, not just the feature set. That’s where Azure-based Mavim scores for over 1000 global customers—it lets them use the apps they already know, from Excel and Visio to Microsoft BI.