Article
Effective change management for technology adoption: A compelling case
What’s the surest way to turn a promising technology investment into a painful business loss? Neglecting technology change management that drives successful adoption among your workers.
In Eagle Hill’s experience, organizations too often mis-frame change management for technology adoption as a system rollout, rather than as a multi-dimensional business transformation that requires a deliberate rewiring of strategy, operating model, culture, and behaviors: in essence, deep changes supported by robust technology change management.
Eagle Hill recognizes technology adoption as a capability, not a phase. Organizations don’t struggle because the technology is wrong; they struggle because adoption isn’t designed, embedded, or reinforced as the work evolves.
Endemic change management issues
Unfortunately, treating the technology itself as the goal, rather than as the catalyst to business ends, is an all-too-common scenario. And when technology itself becomes the focus, adoption suffers. According to a 2023 IFP study, Poor Change Management is Costing Business Millions, 32 percent of respondents reported that poor change management during a digital transformation cost their businesses between $1 million and $5 million dollars.
In other words, nearly one third of businesses suffered considerable unnecessary hits to their bottom line because they failed to plan properly for the biggest piece of their change journey: their people. What makes this mistake particularly dismaying is that it’s preventable. Organizations often delay change initiatives until after design decisions are finalized, underestimate the human aspects and behavioral effort required, and rely on late-stage communications or training to drive adoption. The result is predictable and costly.
Three tell-tale signs of weak technology change management
Technology implementations with underdeveloped change management share some unmistakable hallmarks:
Change starts too late
User engagement begins after the design decisions are locked in, without first grounding them in real user workflows or considering potential end user roadblocks. Moreover, starting user engagement late gives resistance time to take hold.
Behavior change is underestimated
Leaders and integrators focus on delivery, leaving adoption to late-stage communications or generic training. Frustrated and disillusioned users soon revert to their old familiar ways.
Breakdowns surface immediately
Poor change control leads to productivity dips, timelines slip, costs rise, and user adoption stalls. Research shows that without robust change management in place, project timelines can shift by 3–9 months and generate significant unplanned expenses related to rework and prolonged post-go-live support. Employees pay the personal costs of mediocre organizational change management as well. Eagle Hill’s 2025 study, The State of Organizational Change Management: U.S. Employee Insights, found that more than a quarter of employees experienced a decrease in job satisfaction in the wake of change.
Three user-centered principles behind sustainable technology adoption
So, what’s a responsible leader to do? Remember, your goal is to plan for an implementation of technology change management that frees the technology to make work easier and performance stronger over the long term. In Eagle Hill’s experience, the best technology adoption focuses on the user at every stage of the process:
1
Start with readiness and real work
Begin with understanding your culture, your people, their overall readiness for successful technology adoption and how work actually happens. This will ensure user adoption gets designed into the solution, not layered on afterward.
2
Co-create with IT, business leaders and end users
Design together so business goals and process changes align with technology to enhance workflows, simplify tasks, and deliver results in practice, not just in theory. (Despite how important this practice is to future adoption, Eagle Hill research found that less than half of employees say new technology rollouts in their organization are accompanied by corresponding new processes.)
3
Use data to adapt continuously
Monitor adoption, end-user sentiment and issues in real time, so that teams can course-correct before small problems become big failures.
Bank on it
Technology investments that don’t deliver their expected ROI (about 50-70 percent of them, according to most estimates) typically share one failing. Whether hardware or software, AI or ERP, the technology itself is not the fatal flaw. Treating user adoption as an afterthought rather than as a core technology change management discipline is. Leaders who embed robust, user-centered change management into technology initiatives give their organizations the best chance to realize lasting value and achieve a successful transformation. So, plan for a through-line of robust technology change management to support your implementation, before planning on any technology investment at all.
You can launch a system on time and still fail if the people who use it every day don’t see themselves in it. Real change meets people where they are, not where the project plan assumes they’ll be.”
– Jennifer Agis
