Digital transformation programmes measure adoption at launch — how many users logged in during the first week, how the training sessions were rated — and treat strong early numbers as evidence the transformation is succeeding. In my experience, the real test comes later, and most programmes aren't measuring for it at all.
Adoption doesn't typically fail at launch, when there's organisational attention, management visibility, and genuine curiosity about the new system. It fails around month four, once the initial novelty fades and a workaround that felt like a temporary inconvenience becomes the new habit — quietly, without anyone announcing that adoption has stalled.
By the time this shows up in usage data, it's already entrenched, because habits are considerably harder to unwind than they were to prevent. The workaround has become normal, and asking people to abandon it now reads as yet another disruptive change, rather than a return to the intended process.
The programmes that sustain adoption build in a specific check at the month-three or month-four mark, deliberately, looking for early signs of workaround formation rather than waiting for a usage-rate dashboard to eventually reflect the decline. This requires talking to users directly, not just watching system logs, because workarounds are frequently invisible to the system itself.
If a digital transformation programme's adoption measurement stops at launch week, it's measuring the easiest part of the problem and missing the part that actually determines whether the investment pays off.