From Orchestration to Governance: Why Digital Adoption Still Isn’t Operationalised, and What Comes Next

The response was stronger than I expected.

Many readers recognised the shift Gartner is pointing to: digital adoption has moved well beyond training and in-app guidance. Orchestration across applications is now essential. Digital friction is measurable. Productivity loss is real. And adoption has become a board-level concern rather than a peripheral enablement issue.

But one assumption kept resurfacing – sometimes explicitly, more often implicitly:

“Digital adoption is already operationalised. What’s missing now is better value measurement.”

That assumption is wrong.

And it explains why the market feels busy, well-tooled – and yet oddly stuck.

The Myth of Operationalised Adoption

On paper, digital adoption looks mature.

Most large organisations now have:

• Adoption tools in place
• Change frameworks and transformation offices
• Usage data, engagement dashboards, and delivery governance
• Repeatable implementation playbooks

From a distance, this can look like operational maturity.

In reality, digital adoption still behaves like a project phase, not an operating discipline.

Across the majority of enterprises, adoption funding, ownership, and accountability end at or shortly after go-live. Once delivery is complete, programmes close, teams move on, and budgets evaporate.

What follows is not dramatic failure. Systems remain live. Users continue logging in. Activity persists.

But value quietly erodes.

Not because people refuse to adopt – but because no one is accountable for sustaining adoption once it becomes “business as usual.”

This is the uncomfortable truth: digital adoption is enabled in many organisations, but it is not operationalised in economic terms.

Why the Market Remains Stuck in Execution

If you examine where most investment, tooling, and capability sit today, the picture becomes clearer.

The bulk of the digital adoption market is concentrated in the execution and enablement layer:

• Learning and development
• Change management
• In-application guidance and orchestration
• Engagement, usage, and behaviour analytics

These capabilities are valuable – but they sit downstream.

They improve how adoption happens. They do not decide whether adoption effort should continue, scale, or stop.

And this matters, because the value proposition at this layer is weak.

When digital adoption is framed primarily as training or enablement, it is inevitably perceived as:

• A support function
• A cost to be managed
• A line item that can be reduced once delivery is complete

So when financial pressure appears, and it always does post go-live – adoption investment is the first to be cut.

Not because leaders don’t care about adoption. But because they have no economic framework that explains why continued investment matters.

The Post Go-Live Value Paradox

Here is the paradox that most organisations still haven’t fully confronted:

You cannot prove adoption value before go-live, because the data that matters only exists after go-live.

Yet most governance models assume value upfront and withdraw funding once systems are live.

As a result:

• Adoption is under instrumented at the point where real work begins
• Productivity signals are partial, lagging, or anecdotal
• “Value” becomes a narrative, not a governed outcome

This is not a tooling failure. It is a governance failure.

And no amount of additional execution capability resolves it.

Orchestration Was Necessary, but Never Sufficient

Gartner is absolutely right to push the market toward orchestration.

Modern work spans ERP, HCM, CRM, analytics, automation, and collaboration layers. Optimising single applications in isolation no longer reflects how value is created.

But orchestration answers only one question:

How do we guide work across complexity?

It does not answer:

• Which work deserves priority
• Where adoption effort should be sustained
• How trade-offs between initiatives are governed
• Who owns productivity outcomes over time

Without answers to those questions, orchestration simply accelerates activity – not value.

The Missing Layer: Economic Authority

This is where the real gap appears.

Everyone now talks about outcomes. Very few organisations can govern them.

What has been missing until now, is an explicit layer of economic authority over digital adoption, sitting above tools, change frameworks, and delivery models.

That authority answers questions such as:

• What outcomes justify continued adoption investment?
• Who owns digital productivity as a managed asset?
• How are competing initiatives arbitrated?
• How is value protected once delivery is complete?

These are not enablement questions. They are governance questions.

Introducing the GOVERN Framework

This is the context in which GOVERN emerges.

GOVERN is not a platform, a methodology, or a maturity model. It does not replace Digital Adoption Platforms, change management, or transformation offices.

GOVERN is an economic governance model for digital adoption.

Its role is deliberately specific:

To establish decision authority over digital adoption as an economic discipline – before effort, tooling, and change are scaled.

At a high level, GOVERN introduces explicit governance over:

• Economic goals (not activity targets)
• Ownership of productivity outcomes
• How value is defined, measured, and validated over time
• How trade-offs between initiatives are made visible
• How value is reinforced after go-live
• How adoption is normalised into operating models rather than treated as a phase

What matters at this stage is not the mechanics, but the shift in thinking: adoption cannot deliver sustained value without economic authority.

Why This Matters Now

Digital adoption penetration remains low, despite years of investment, tooling, and transformation effort.

The constraint is no longer capability. It is confidence.

Boards, CFOs, and executive sponsors are asking harder questions:

• Are we actually getting more productive?
• Where is time being saved – and where is it leaking?
• What should we have delayed, reduced, or stopped?

These questions cannot be answered at the execution layer.

They require governance.

An Inflection Point for the Category

DAAs Economics of Time is ahead of its time – but only just.

As constraints tighten, organisations with the means to do so will move first. They will deploy the full stack from the outset: economic framing, governance, operating models, orchestration, and enablement – deliberately sequenced.

Others will follow more slowly.

But the direction is clear.

The next phase of digital adoption will not be defined by better tools, richer analytics, or louder success stories.

It will be defined by who holds authority over value.

Closing Thought

Digital adoption has already proven it can be enabled.

What it has not yet proven – at scale – is that it can be governed economically.

That is the gap GOVERN is designed to address.

If you’re curious about how GOVERN works in practice, or how it fits into the broader DAA stack, feel free to DM me. I’m deliberately keeping the details tight for now – but the conversation is open.

More to come.