Closing the Adoption Gap: How to Build Analytics Stakeholders Will Actually Use

As organizations invest in analytics, a costly challenge emerges: teams build technically robust, high-impact solutions that fail simply because stakeholders refuse to adopt them. In part six of our series on the gaps quietly draining ROI from data and AI initiatives, we ask a critical question: Are our analytics deliverables fully adopted by stakeholders, or are we building tools no one actually uses?

After all, building a perfect solution doesn’t guarantee adoption. If I offered you a device that would reduce your risk of dying in an automobile accident by 45%, would you take it? You’re likely thinking, “Of course!” History actually suggests otherwise.

In 1959, Swedish engineer Nils Bohlin invented the three-point seat belt. Drivers and passengers surely adopted the life-saving technology immediately, right? Or within a few years for sure?

25 years after the introduction of the three-point seat belt, only 14% of riders in the United States voluntarily used the device. It was not until the passing of state and federal laws in the 1980s that adoption began to rise. Today, seat belt use is above 90%, and as a result lives are saved every day.

In this dramatic example, we see that humans are incredibly prone to resisting change—even change that promises extraordinary benefits. You have probably seen this same resistance in your organization when it comes to adopting new practices, processes, and tools.

Many well-intentioned and high-value projects fail to launch because stakeholders refuse to get on board with the change.

The same pattern plays out across government organizations. Agencies invest in dashboards, decision-support tools, and AI capabilities only to find that analysts and program teams continue relying on familiar spreadsheets, email chains, or legacy workflows because the new solution doesn’t fit how they actually work.

Why is it that organizations resist adopting solutions that have the potential to increase stakeholder value, employee satisfaction, and organizational success?

The reason often comes from three challenges:

Some adoption initiatives fail because they should never have begun in the first place. Why? Because the initiative was an attempt to solve the wrong problem or one that doesn’t support the overall strategy of the organization or team.

Identifying issues at face value is easy: Sales are down. Shoplifting is up. Employee satisfaction is struggling. These issues could be approached in any number of ways, but there are probably only one or two root causes which need to be addressed to solve the issues.

Take shoplifting, for instance. “Reduce shoplifting” sounds like a clear goal, but shoplifting itself is often just a symptom. The underlying root cause might be poor store layouts with low-visibility aisles, an outdated inventory control system, or understaffing during peak hours. If you build an expensive analytics dashboard to track theft hot-spots without addressing the root cause—like fixing floor schedules or sightlines—you’ve solved the wrong problem, and the theft will continue.

Rather than doing the hard work of tracing symptoms back to their source, organizations can run the risk of misdiagnosing the outcome as the core issue—spending valuable time and resources fixing the wrong problem while stakeholder adoption falters.

How do we avoid solving the wrong problem? It often comes down to proper root-cause analysis. One way to approach this is using the Five Whys technique, made famous by Sakichi Toyoda at Toyota. Consider the top-level issue you are currently facing and ask, “Why is this happening?” Once you’ve answered that question, ask “Why?” of the next issue and so on. The power in this and other root-cause analysis techniques is that it challenges our assumptions and forces us to understand the issues at the heart of our toughest problems.

When identifying problems (and moving toward solutions), it is important to back up our findings with data. While we may have intuition about what our real problems are, collecting and analyzing relevant data to support our findings is critical. We love helping clients spot the real issues using these processes!

If your stakeholders, especially the team members responsible for implementing the solution, agree with you about the real problem, your project is much more likely to succeed.

In the face of the all-out assault of AI marketing, the answer to any problem these days must be AI, right? What we have seen (and what you have probably experienced) is that while AI hype is real, the promised ROI does not always meet expectations .

Before attempting to identify what practice, process, or tool to implement, it is important to first identify the problem. You should only move to solutioning once the problem has been clearly identified and agreed upon by your team.

A key to successful adoption is choosing the right solution for the specific problem at hand. Today, we have an abundance of AI tools at our disposal—but they aren’t one-size-fits-all. If tools aren’t selected intentionally with the end goal in mind, initiatives will struggle to gain traction simply because people are fighting against the wrong tool for the job.

Additionally, when it comes to building data-driven solutions to solve real problems, success is often determined not by what is involved but by who is involved.

Implementing the right solution—one that will provide real ROI—takes a team working with data experts to craft a solution that fits a particular need. Who do you have helping you with this process? We call this step clinching the execution.

What we often see is that teams need more than recommendations to solve their problems—they need experts who will be with them from problem definition to solution execution.

If your stakeholders can see the solution has the potential to truly solve the problem at hand, they will be that much more willing to adopt it.

Adoption often comes down to a battle of wills. The will of leadership to push consequential and often uncomfortable changes through an organization. The will of the stakeholders expected to follow through and make the necessary changes.

Adoption often breaks down when those expected to implement a change fail to understand the business value at stake. If all stakeholders see is the short-term pain and no gain, they won’t have the motivation to implement.

Stakeholders need clarity on what is at stake if the initiative fails. Whether it is the threat of competitor pressure, loss of revenue, or poor customer satisfaction scores, the necessity of success needs to be understood. In government, the value may not be measured in quarterly revenue. It may be faster mission execution, better stewardship of taxpayer resources, improved readiness, or enabling analysts and operators to make more informed decisions.

On the flip side, what are the rewards of success? Why should stakeholders be motivated to undergo the short-term pain? The benefits of success (and consequences of failure) need to be clearly understood by leadership first and communicated frequently to stakeholders.

Our mindset when it comes to working with stakeholders is to bring everyone along. From problem definition to finished product, all affected stakeholders need to be part of the process. By working as a team with a shared mission that clearly understands the value of the work being done, your project is more likely to succeed.

In the data science industry, only 20% of proposed solutions make it to implementation. The fallout of this frightening statistic is lost revenue, wasted R&D budget, and demoralized teams.

At Elder Research, a MANTECH company, we have a track record of bringing 90% of our solutions to adoption, delivering real ROI. We outperform the industry average because we understand that a people-centered approach to data is essential for success. If you want help navigating your next big change, let us know!