We are thrilled to announce that the WalkMe Digital Adoption Platform won an InfoWorld 2022 Technology of the Year Award. This tremendous honor comes right after we won Business Intelligence Group’s 2022 Artificial Intelligence Excellence Award for our UI Intelligence product.
This prestigious recognition coupled with the clear momentum in the digital adoption space feels like an arrival moment for WalkMe on the world stage.
While 2022 is certainly looking like a watershed year for the Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) category WalkMe created, the momentum has been building for just over a decade. And now we celebrate our incredible journey as a company.
April 2022 marks the 10 year anniversary of when WalkMe introduced the industry’s first Digital Adoption Platform to the market. What got its start as a “nice to have” evolved to a “got to have it,” thanks to the continued investment in digital transformation projects and the ROI derived from increased digital adoption.
More than 13 patents, 2,000+ customers, a global pandemic and an initial public offering later, we are finally seeing digital adoption as a line item carved out within budgets for digital transformation projects. We are seeing critical mass for DAP.
Over the past few years alone, there has been a significant uptick in DAP category coverage within the industry analyst community. As of Q1 2022, leading analyst firms including Gartner, Forrester and IDC all officially covered DAP as a category with at least one dedicated analyst.
And in January 2022, IDC published its first dedicated report on Digital Adoption Platforms (IDC TechBrief, Amy Loomis and Marci Maddox), and we expect to see evaluative reports from Forrester and Gartner later in 2022-2023 (Forrester NewTech, Forrester New Wave, and Gartner Magic Quadrant).
The importance of successful digital adoption technologies
In an era when digital transformation reigns supreme, technology adoption is the gatekeeper to those projects’ success. Over time, enterprises have come to realize that their digital projects are at risk if they can’t better embed those technologies into their businesses. It’s as simple as that.
Undoubtedly, digital adoption’s role in successful digital transformation projects was a foregone conclusion when the first DAP was launched a decade ago. Yet the tipping point–and critical mass–is upon us now. Why?
One big reason is that technology adoption has traditionally gone unmeasured. This is because management’s attention has not been where the value is achieved. For example, management is very involved before a new system goes live; they are very focused on identifying the business needs, the development strategy, and deployment.
However, it’s only once the new system goes live that value will actually be realized. Yet, by go-live, management’s attention is already focused on the next digital project, often leaving the new system without the dedicated resources it requires to realize its full potential and bring home the best possible ROI.
It’s like a farmer who continuously plants crops but does not go back to tend to them because they are busy planting the next one.
The rising demand for Digital Adoption Professionals
Yet companies that broadly embrace DAP across their tech stack do not need to work on individual business outcomes. They can focus on many business outcomes at once from shortening customer ticket handling time to ensuring CRM data quality by following our four step process:
- Evaluate systems to discover actual adoption metrics.
- Identify areas of improvement using WalkMe’s insights.
- Define success for your organization and deploy solutions, the result is a better user experience with in-app guidance and automation.
- Continue to measure and optimize to ensure success into the future.
Over time, it became more and more clear that enterprises need a dedicated person or team to focus on the critical moment of when digital projects go live — and beyond.
What is the ROI? How can it be measured? This can be a digital adoption professional who works exclusively on the successful adoption of technology within an organization.
And their tool of the trade is a robust digital adoption platform, which provides immediate insights to create and deliver elegant experiences for users to access the full functionality and value of applications, ultimately fulfilling the promise of digital transformation.
The successful creation of the DAP market category has given rise to an entirely new profession – Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) Professionals.
There has been a 30% increase in LinkedIn profiles with this title, from 2,700 in March 2021 to 3,500 in March 2022. This model works. Individuals are recognizing it a career opportunity and enterprises are recognizing it a winning strategy for digital transformation success.
With digital adoption being the missing link between the investment in technology and the value being realized, critical mass for DAP is here. And it’s growing steadily.
Hear more from our WalkMe executives as they share their perspectives on the state of digital adoption and introduce exciting new products and services that will transform the digital outcomes enterprises can achieve on the market-leading WalkMe platform.
