Technology is viewed as a strategic asset in any corporate strategy. They recognize that it is fundamental to their operations, efficiencies and innovation. With out a strategic approach for the use of technology in their daily operations, companies could be undermining their competitive edge and overall success.

Yet, we see many corporations spending millions on software technology that never gets fully operationalized to make the business impact that was expected. With software solutions to evaluate all the software a company has in house; customers can analyze the duplications and help lower costs and get to the right core tech stack. Even with these solutions in place to help them understand what technologies are being utilized, a deeper analysis will find that an average of 60-65% of software purchased each year is never implemented or operationalized into production use.

Here are the top 5 reasons why companies find it challenging to operationalize new software technologies:

1. Resource Constraints

2. Skill and experience gaps

3. Integration within existing technology stack

4. Security compliance

5. Resistance to Change

6. Demonstrate the business value

For software companies to grow and expand their customer base, these challenges will need to be addressed as part of the customer’s strategic roadmap and implementation plans.

First let’s understand what these obstacles are and why customers have these concerns, then we will discuss how to overcome each obstacle.

1. Resource Constraints

The definition of a resource in any corporation refers to an asset, capability or tool a company uses to achieve its objective, including money, equipment, technology, facilities, IP, employees and skills. For technology implementations, these are the most common resource constraints:

• Financial Limitations:

  One of the first roadblocks will be the struggle to have sufficient budget allocated to a project or technology investment to get it to be fully operationalized to realize the expected business impact.

• Human Capital:

  The next common roadblock will be their employees with the required skills and experience to implement and manage new technologies.

• Technology Infrastructure:

  The last resource constraint will be ensuring the existing infrastructure is compatible with and can support the new technology.

2. Skill Gaps and Training Needs:

• Lack of expertise:

  Many organizations lack the internal expertise to effectively implement and manage new technologies, including how to simulate it into their daily operations, requiring significant investment in training and hiring. 

• Rapid technological advancements:

  The fast pace of innovation makes it challenging for companies to keep their workforce up to date with the latest technologies in a timely manner. 

3. Integration with Existing Systems:

• Compatibility issues:

  New technologies may not easily integrate with legacy systems, requiring significant effort and resources to ensure seamless operation and constant maintenance to ensure with every technology update the integrations don’t break. 

• Data migration and transformation:

  As data migration and transformation may be required when incorporating new systems, moving data between different systems can be complex and time-consuming, potentially leading to errors and disruptions. 

4. Security Concerns

• Cybersecurity threats:

  Implementing new technologies can introduce new security vulnerabilities, requiring robust security measures to maintain compliance and protect sensitive data and systems.

• Data privacy:

  Ensuring compliance with data privacy regulations (e.g., GDPR) is crucial, but can be complex, challenging and require IT resources. 

5. Resistance to Change:

• Employee reluctance:

  Employees may resist adopting new technologies, fearing job displacement or the need to learn new skills. 

• Organizational silos:

  Different departments may have different priorities and approaches to technology, making it difficult to achieve a unified vision. 

6. Demonstrating Business Value:

• Difficulty in measuring ROI:

  It can be challenging to accurately measure the return on investment (ROI) of new technologies, making it difficult to justify the investment.

• Lack of clear metrics:

  Organizations may struggle to define and track relevant metrics to assess the performance of new technologies. 

How can a strategic customer roadmap plan address these roadblocks to operationalizing new technologies?

Let’s look at how the strategic roadmap plan can help a customer to understand a pathway to resolving these restraints and concerns.

Overcoming Resource Restraints

Starting with Resource restraints. We know that the Enterprise market usually has more budget and resources to work with. The secret is to show the customer in the strategic roadmap plan within the first phase how your solution will free up some resources and save costs due to the automation and process changes that can streamline processes and reallocate their time to support more impactful responsibilities.

For the mid-market companies that tend to have fewer resources to spare, it is a combination of having a service program that can provide the support initially for the heavy lift of getting the first phase implemented where the solution frees up the resource(s) required to roll out the solution into production across the rest of the company.

In either case, it’s important to show the customer the difference between their current state of operations and the new future state of how efficient and effective their organization will operate with your solution. This will be the driving force for the team and the key sponsors to be motivated to support the implementation team.

If you leave it to the customer to figure out this plan and all they see is a big project that will require a lot of time and resources, the technology implementation project will be dead on arrival.

As you plan out the strategic roadmap plan, show them how your service program can help shorten the implementation cycle and get to a production launch faster with a detailed plan.

Overcoming Skill Gaps

Ensuring the customer has a team with the right skills, knowledge and experience can be challenging depending on how the solution was sold and who was involved in the decision process. The best approach is to share with the customer the recommended customer team roles and responsibilities that ensures they will be successful.

Here is an example of the customer team member roles you may recommend:

If the customer doesn’t have people available on their teams that meet your recommendations to support the implementation, you can offer two options:

1. A service program where you provide the consulting expertise to fill the gap until they can hire someone or provide a resource

2. A Partner program that can provide the consulting or resource expertise to support the customer as either a managed care service or a consulting service to fill the gap or train internal resources.

Overcoming Integration with Existing Systems

While many solutions do not require an integration to be in place to launch into production, if a solution can be integrated into some of the critical operational applications in production today, you will have a very secure sticky factor established.

If the solution does require an integration to be operationalized in production and the customer doesn’t have the internal skills and experience or has limited capacity, this is an opportunity to provide the following options:

1. A connector that can be easily setup and configured by the team

2. A Consulting service that will setup required integrations for the customer

3. A Partner service that can offer the setup of required integrations or as a managed care program

If the SaaS company is in the early stages of getting to their first $10m, they can get creative with a pricing structure that makes it easy for them to say yes initially providing them with the service and support required to operationalize the solution and with the first year expansion plan recoups the revenue within the first year.

Overcoming Security Concerns

Most customers will have a set of expectations based on a what was committed in the sales cycle or included in the contract. I recommend the product and service teams work together to have a plan for addressing all security compliance requirements whether they will be delivered in the GA product or a custom solution that will ensure the compliance requirements can be met.

For customers to be committed to the implementation, show how each of the requirements will be established as part of the implementation plan including any required reporting or documentation for production launch.

Overcoming Resistance to Change

Change is hard and time consuming. The most effective approach to helping customers come along the journey with you is to show them how their job will be impacted for the better.

For example, diagram the details of how they may complete a particular process today and discuss the challenges, errors and inconstancies that may occur. Then diagram what the future process with the new solution in place will look like including how their job will be easier, faster, more accurate and provide better information. The idea is that when you demonstrate what their job will look like in the future, they should be saying “Yes, please, I need that in place now.”

Overcoming How to Show Business Value

I am always surprised when folks say it is difficult to get customers to provide the data to show the value. Usually if they are not providing the information, it is because they don’t understand what to track and therefore may not be tracking the right data to show the business improvements and impact.

Provide customers with a recommendation on the metrics and KPIs they should be tracking to show the business value and impact. Ask the customer to track and baseline the metrics in the current state so once you have the technology in production, they can track the same metrics and KPIs to show the improvements over time. From the metrics, they can work with their Finance teams to turn the metric improvements into hard ROI values like cost savings or revenue growth.

In Summary, when designing a strategic customer roadmap plan, define the details for overcoming any of the challenges defined above that may be obstacles for a customer to be fully committed to the plan to operationalize the solution across their organization. Document and publish the plan to the entire customer team including the stakeholders highlighting the value outcomes and shorter timelines to production Go-Live.

As always your feedback is welcome. If you found this article helpful, please share our newsletter with your colleagues and friends and subscribe. If you would like help in designing a strategic roadmap plan to help your customers operationalize your solution, please reach out to [email protected].