When SAPās ROI studies for SuccessFactors and S/4HANA appeared – projecting returns of more than 100 percent – they sparked attention across the enterprise community.
But they also raised a deeper question: what truly drives those returns?
For decades, transformation success has been measured by project delivery – scope, schedule, budget.
Once the new system went live, the ROI box was ticked, and attention moved elsewhere.
That model no longer works.
Across more than two decades working with large SAP programmes, Iāve lost count of how many times Iāve seen the same pattern repeat. The cutover completes successfully, dashboards turn green, and the implementation team celebrates a smooth go-live.
In the first two deep dives of this series, I explored the Legacy Loop why outdated change models break under continuous transformation and the Blind Spots, why vanity metrics hide the truth about user behavior.
In the first article of this series, I argued that adoption isnāt a training activity that ends at go-live. Itās an operating model that must be embedded into enterprise infrastructure. Until leaders make that shift, every other risk becomes secondary.
Technology is everywhere – but real value remains elusive. While digital initiatives continue to multiply across functions and platforms, the vast majority fail to deliver business impact. Research consistently shows that 94% of digital initiatives underperform, not due to a lack of investment, but due to a failure in adoption.
