The Blind Spots is Unk Unk #2: The High Costs of Not Seeing User Behavior

If you missed that article, you can read it here.

This second article focuses on another Unk Unk that quietly erodes value in RISE with SAP programs: the Blind Spots. Put simply, most enterprises don’t know how their users are actually behaving inside the system.

This Is a Series About the Risks You Don’t See

This article is the second deep dive in what I describe as a 6+1 series on adoption in RISE with SAP. There are six Unk Unks that repeatedly undermine transformation, and we’ll explore each of them in detail.

But remember: all six share the same foundation. Adoption is not a project deliverable. It’s an operating model that must be embedded into the enterprise. If you don’t buy into that, the rest of this series is a moot point.

The Visibility Gap

Ask most executives running a RISE program how adoption is going, and the answers tend to sound reassuring:

• “Training attendance is at 90%”
• “User logins are steady”
• “We’ve ticked off all the cutover tasks”

On paper, everything looks fine. But these are vanity metrics. They say nothing about whether users are completing critical workflows correctly, or whether processes are delivering the promised outcomes.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: in most programs, leaders are flying blind.

They don’t know:

• Where users abandon workflows
• How often employees revert to spreadsheets or old systems
• Which features are underused or ignored
• Where error rates spike after go-live

And if you can’t see adoption in real time, you can’t manage it.

The Second Unk Unk: The Blind Spots

Enterprises often assume they know how users are engaging with the system, but the reality is very different. This lack of visibility creates a gap between what leaders think is happening and what’s actually happening on the ground.

Symptoms of the Blind Spots include:

• Surprise failures when critical processes stall after go-live
• Rework and duplication because users bypass the system
• Rising support tickets that reveal issues no one anticipated
• Business leaders losing faith because promised efficiencies don’t materialize

The Blind Spots are dangerous because they don’t just cause problems, they hide them until they’ve already caused damage.

The High Costs of Flying Blind

The consequences of the Blind Spots ripple across the enterprise:

• Underutilized investment – millions spent on licenses, but features unused
• Lost productivity – workflows take longer when employees hunt for workarounds
• Increased error rates – poor adoption undermines data quality, reporting and compliance
• Delayed value realization – benefits projected in months slip to years
• Change fatigue – employees disengage when they feel the system is slowing them down

Consider three examples I’ve seen in RISE with SAP programs anchored on S/4HANA:

1. A global manufacturer invested over $80 million in RISE with SAP to re-platform its finance and quality operations on S/4HANA. Adoption dashboards proudly reported 90% of users logging in. But deeper analysis revealed that fewer than half of critical quality processes were being executed in the new system. The result: regulatory exposure and potential fines.
2. A financial services firm migrated its core finance and procurement processes into S/4HANA under RISE. Six months in, leaders discovered that more than half of expense and purchasing approvals were still being handled offline in spreadsheets. Employees found workarounds faster than the new workflows. By the time this was discovered, 12 months of reporting data had been compromised.
3. A multinational retailer rolled out new procurement workflows in S/4HANA as part of its RISE transformation. Within weeks, analytics revealed that 40% of requisitions were bypassing the system entirely. The Blind Spots meant leadership thought compliance was high – until an audit uncovered significant breaches in purchasing policy.

In each case, the system was technically live, the dashboards looked positive, but the Blind Spots were eroding ROI and exposing the business to unseen risks.

Every quarter that adoption lags, value slips further away. And once users disengage, rebuilding confidence becomes exponentially harder.

Why the Blind Spots Persist

Why do enterprises keep flying blind? Three reasons:

1. Old metrics Training completions and logins are easy to measure but meaningless for adoption.
2. Fragmented ownership IT, HR, operations, and change all collect different data points, but no one unifies them into a single adoption view.
3. No embedded analytics Too few organizations invest in platforms that track workflow completion, error rates, or in-system behavior.

The result: leaders rely on lagging indicators – support tickets, complaints, delayed ROI – instead of real-time insight.

It’s like driving a car by looking only in the rear-view mirror. By the time you see the problem, you’ve already crashed.

How Elite Enterprises Create Visibility

Elite enterprises recognize that adoption without measurement is just hope. They build real-time visibility into their adoption operating model.

Here’s how:

1. Define the right metrics: They measure what matters:
   – % of users completing critical workflows
   – Error rate reductions
   – Cycle time improvements
   – Productivity gains
   – Compliance and customer satisfaction outcomes
2. Instrument the system: Tools like WalkMe, Signavio, and SAP Business AI are used not just for guidance, but for behavioral analytics. Every click, completion, and error can be tracked, analyzed, and acted upon.
3. Unify the data: Adoption insights aren’t scattered across IT, HR, and operations. They’re consolidated into dashboards executives and business leaders can act on
4. Close the loop: Data doesn’t sit idle. It’s fed directly into release cycles so adoption issues are fixed in weeks, not months
5. Make it business-owned: Adoption visibility isn’t a side project for IT. It’s reviewed at the same level as financial and operational metrics – by the same leaders

The difference is profound.

• One global enterprise integrated adoption KPIs into its board packs. By showing how system usage linked to revenue cycle times, adoption went from a “support function” to a board-level performance driver
• Another tracked error rates in finance workflows. Within one quarter, targeted in-flow guidance reduced errors by 35% and freed up hundreds of hours in rework
• Visibility isn’t just about dashboards. It’s about connecting user behavior to business performance in a way executives can’t ignore

Why This Isn’t Just About Tools

At this point, some leaders say: “But RISE includes WalkMe. Doesn’t that solve the problem?”

The answer is no, because tools aren’t operating models.

WalkMe is a powerful platform. It can show you where users click, drop off, or make errors. But unless that data is:

• Linked to business outcomes
• Embedded into governance and release cycles, and
• Acted on by a permanent adoption team

…it risks becoming just another underutilized dashboard.

WalkMe is an accelerator, not a substitute for adoption strategy. Without an operating model around it, the data doesn’t translate into decisions or outcomes.

Visibility only matters if it’s operationalized.

Why Now and Why DAA?

RISE with SAP has changed the stakes. With quarterly updates, AI copilots, and interconnected cloud applications, the pace of change is accelerating. Leaders can’t afford to wait six months for retrospectives to tell them what went wrong.

They need adoption visibility in real time.

The problem is, most enterprises don’t have:

• Clear adoption KPIs beyond training and logins
• A unified adoption dashboard across functions
• Processes to act quickly on behavioral insights
• A permanent team to embed analytics into operations

That’s the missing link.

This is where Digital Adoption Advisor (DAA) comes in.

At DAA, we help enterprises:

• Design adoption operating models with visibility built in
• Define the right KPIs tied to outcomes executives care about
• Operationalize analytics from WalkMe, Signavio, LeanIX, and SAP Business AI
• Integrate adoption dashboards into release cycles and governance
• Turn data into decisions that protect ROI

Why now? Because every quarter without visibility is another quarter of value leakage. Blind Spots don’t stay neutral – they accumulate risk and cost.

And AI makes the urgency sharper. SAP is embedding AI co-pilots into its cloud applications. These co-pilots promise to streamline work, but they only function if users interact with the system consistently. Without visibility into behavior, AI is starved of clean training data and adoption stalls.

Without visibility, the AI dividend is lost before it begins.

Final Thought

The second Unk Unk of RISE with SAP adoption is the Blind Spots: the lack of visibility into real user behaviour.

The Legacy Loop and the Blind Spots are closely connected. If your adoption model is outdated and linear, you won’t have the visibility to see where adoption is failing. Together, they form a cycle that quietly drains ROI. Breaking out of both is essential.

If you can’t see adoption, you can’t manage it.

At DAA, our mission is to help leaders close that visibility gap – embedding adoption analytics into the operating model so RISE delivers continuous value, not just a technical go-live.

Because in transformation, it’s not the risks you see that decide ROI. It’s the ones you don’t.