Ensuring a Return on Software Investments

There are many reasons for investing in software, ranging from giving employs the tools they need to do their jobs, creating a shared platform to collaborate on, mitigating risk such as security measures to prevent cyber-crime or data loss and the associated financial loss, compliance and for legislative reasons. Whatever the reason, this technology is used by your employees to increase productivity and reduce risk.

Software in the past was sold as an investment into a silver bullet to make things easier and problems magically disappear; witness the insane investments in CRM technology at the turn of the century, which promised solid relationships and lucrative clients. In those days, organisations felt that their employees would intuitively adopt this technology and, cue the harps, money would roll into bank accounts to the celestial tones of heavenly music.

Instead employees regarded this new technology with intense suspicion, all it did as far as they were concerned was tie them down to mundane admin and undermine their power wielded through their jealously guarded knowledge of the clients from their colleagues in an attempt to make themselves indispensable. The employees did the bare minimum and the data was so dirty it was of no use to anyone.

We realise today that people are critical to maximising your investment in software. Their behaviour must be aligned through Change Management, Training and Coaching on the strategy, software and processes; factors which make your organisation successful. The software too must be designed and configured around intuitive ease-of-use for your employees to maximise technology adoption.

This is how you maximise your return on your investment into software.