Simplifying is key to unlocking the benefits of digital innovation

Despite the acceleration of digital innovation efforts, WalkMe’s Asia Pacific SVP and Chief Evangelist, Raj Sundarason, thinks that “we simply are not getting the impact we thought we want.”

He was speaking at GovInsider’s Festival of Innovation which happened in March in Singapore.

By the end of 2025, it seems that an excess of US$5 trillion (S$6.4 trillion) would have been spent on transformation programs, including software and service upgrades, he shared.

“It’s not about the technology...  the paradigm for digital adoption is to get technology to engage with the user,” he said.

Sundarason also introduced the concept of Digital Adoption Platforms (DAPs) to make complex government software more intuitive, ultimately improving public service delivery.

The impact of the DAP

Since its inception, WalkMe has helped governments and citizens around the world engage with services across the board, he shared.

For instance, WalkMe has assisted the Australian government by simplifying navigation and reducing support tickets by 50 per cent to improve immigration officers’ efficiency with visa processing.

“We are also helping [ministries] drive innovation [and] configurations a lot quicker as they try to keep up with pace of change.

“In some instances, we’ve reduced the four to six months times it’s taken to evolve platform changes and configurations down to hours, if not days,” he explained.

He added that the DAP works like an overlay, working across user’s tech stacks and aggregating everything beneath it.

The DAP then aggregates everything within the technology stack, such as what applications, amount of time spent and frequency of use.

He explained that it was in this way that the DAP allowed for cost optimisation for organisations.

Barriers to entry: The overwhelmed employee

Consumed by emails, fidgeting on the phone, and the age-old lack of time. Sounds familiar?

Sundarason questioned: “why are [employees] not using the software that’s been deployed [in their organisation] when it could potentially address their problems?”

According to him, the top barriers of entry to streamlining digital access were:

1. Fifty per cent of users drop off when processes take more than 2 minutes
2. Sixty-five per cent are more likely to successfully complete a process with automation
3. Sixty-two per cent of users abandon executing a business process at the halfway point and beyond
4. Processes with 10 or more steps has a 50 per cent user fail rate
    

As such, rather than being about technology, digital adoption was about the humans who engaged with it, he explained.

To illustrate his point, he compared the WalkMe platform with a GPS:

Rather than asking users to learn, or teaching users something entirely new, the WalkMe platform allowed users to get from point A to B in the most effective and efficient way possible like a GPS, he explained.

In this way, WalkMe helped organisations guide users through online applications and workflows, making it easier for them to understand and use complex applications by providing contextual help.

You can watch Sundarason’s presentation recording on-demand here