First, what is a Walk Through?

Simply put, a Walk Through guides users through application tasks by highlighting each step of the task in sequence, providing instructions and allowing the user to enter data into the live application at each step. Other names for Walk Throughs include WalkThru, Flow, Guide, Tour.

Despite differing User Interfaces, the core of how Walk Throughs are created is basically the same. The Walk Through is built manually by having someone trained in the tool go through the application process step by step, creating instructions for every step. Some tools require code snippets to be embedded in the “target” application, some require the content creator to adjust various controls at each step to make the Walk Through work, some require actual HTML for various features, some require inserting other tools to enable movement between applications, and … well, you get the point. Bottom line, it’s manual and the degree of manual varies, but it’s frustratingly manual.

It’s great that after decades of poor adoption execution that Digital Adoption Platforms offer a better and faster way to onboard users and help them perform their jobs. Walk Throughs have been the driving force behind the success of DAPs. In the last five years, DAPs have increasingly focused on the B2B enterprise space involving critical applications like ERP, CRM, HCM, SCM, SIS, and many other acronyms. Why? Because historically, enterprise is where effective adoption practices have overwhelmingly failed. It’s also where the big money is.

Enterprise applications involve the “Big Leagues” – big applications, big customers, big systems integrators, big risk. To be credible in the big leagues, you have to be able to work at the scale of these applications and entities. While there have been technology and user interface improvements, fundamentally, these tools remain manual.

Let’s look at a common setting for an enterprise digital transformation:

• Digital transformation project – implementing, updating or optimizing a critical application, usually involving a critical application like an ERP, HCM or CRM system.
• User base – usually in the thousands with multiple geographies.
• Number of application processes – rarely less than several hundred but often into the thousands.
• Who is involved – a major systems integrator, the company’s Program Management Office (PMO), many company Subject Matter Experts (SME’s) representing their functional areas.

Common factors that impede effective adoption:

• Timeline pressure – the final phase of any project is stressful with constant timeline pressure and compression.
• Budget & Time – there is little time or budget for extensive process documentation for UAT, training, compliance or post go-live adoption support.
• Staff availability – Learning & Development team members are very few in number, if at all and SME’s are rarely open to learning new tools, particularly documentation tools, to document their areas of domain expertise.
• Unproductive tools and methods – existing tools and methods are rarely equipped to handle high volume.

Existing Walk Through tools take 4-24 hours to generate one Walk Through for one application process, depending on the complexity of the process. Enterprise applications are dense with processes, with Workday approaching 500, SAP and Oracle near 3,000 (all modules), EPIC and Cerner in the thousands. “Small” enterprise applications are rarely below 200 processes. And most large companies have over 200 applications in their tech stack, which makes adoption issues pervasive and on-going.

Follow the math: 200 processes x 4-24 hours creation time per process = 800 to thousands of hours. Extending a DAP to multiple applications quickly makes the math impossible for existing DAP Walk Through technologies. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find those among their customers that have generated a couple hundred Walk Throughs. As a result, existing Walk Through DAPs provide poor coverage of enterprise applications and extend poorly across their customers’ application stacks.

The ideal Enterprise Digital Adoption Platform needs five things:

1. Ease of Use – so easy to use, anyone can do it, especially the SME’s that have the application expertise but not the time.
2. Speed – so fast to use that you can document application processes, no matter how complex, in minutes.
3. Versatility – can serve the full range of user competency which requires other forms of help content because Walk Throughs alone are not sufficient.
4. Application Agnostic – can be used on most major applications including cross-application processes.
5. No Code – no embedded code, API’s or integrations into target applications which can create security weakness.