Top ERP Failures; SAP Acquires WalkMe; DAP vs. LMS; and Cats Slapping Each Other | State of Change Enablement

Rocco Seyboth [00:00:00]:

There's a huge conspiracy among all enterprise software vendors. What they've decided to do is build as many features as possible so they can accommodate as many customer requests as possible. SAP has 100 products because they literally couldn't jam all the features in. And yet what they claim is that their software is super easy to use. It requires very minimal training. Every single enterprise software company says that. And yet what SAP is signaling to you, and what I think is true not just of SAP products, but other enterprise software, is that maybe that's not true.

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Intro/Outro [00:00:49]:

Welcome to Change enablers, a podcast by Tango. Sit back, relax, and listen to some of the brightest minds in operations and enablement.

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Ken Babcock [00:01:04]:

Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Change Enablers podcast. We are doing the third state of change enablement, and I have my dear friend Rocco back with us for the third time. Rocco is the third time. The charm, is this going to be the one that's going to blow people's minds?

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Rocco Seyboth [00:01:20]:

Actually, I think our first one was best and it's been all downhill since then.

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Ken Babcock [00:01:23]:

Okay, all right, fair enough.

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Rocco Seyboth [00:01:27]:

Should we start the bottom with better energy? Third time.

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Ken Babcock [00:01:30]:

Yeah. No, it's the charm. Yeah, we will do our best. No, there's some really good stuff to talk about today. I'm always excited to have you back on. I think it's a fun dynamic just to offer what's happening in the world and also how we are translating it at tango. Let's just jump right in.

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Rocco Seyboth [00:01:51]:

There was a pretty big thing that happened, so I'm actually pumped to talk about.

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Ken Babcock [00:01:56]:

Yeah, yeah, it's big. It fits into our top news segment. So for those who are listening to state of change enablement for the very first time, top news is where we bring the most relevant stories to change enablers. Rocco and I discuss them and we give it a mango score on one to five. It's like an Uber ride. Five stars. If it's good or, you know, I don't know, five stars if you enter some exchange with your Uber driver where he gives you five stars, whatever. Very arbitrary, but it's important to us.

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Ken Babcock [00:02:27]:

So the story we have today is an interesting one, super relevant to a lot of what we're doing at Tango. We discussed it internally quite a bit and we want to bring it to this group because we think there's a lot of angles in which it's relevant. But a couple months ago, Walkme, one of the leading digital adoption platforms, has been around since the early 2010s, entered an agreement to be purchased by SAP. And if you don't know SAP, SAP is this german software megalith? I mean, they are just everywhere and that'll come up later.

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Rocco Seyboth [00:03:03]:

Everybody knows. I don't know if everybody knows.

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Ken Babcock [00:03:06]:

Walk me fair, but this was really interesting to us for a few reasons and we're going to kind of jump into it, but at a highest level, you know, walk me. What they do is they drive digital adoption of other tools. And so Walkme will be embedded in the backend of software that youre using internally to give you tooltips and walkthroughs to make sure that youre using that piece of software effectively. So Walkme might be embedded on your CRM or your ERP, and it doesnt really look like a distinct product. Thats why probably a lot of people dont know about it. It looks like a tutorial or an onboarding flow or sort of this step by step guide that is taking you through the process. Walk me, like I said, has been around for a while, raised about 300 million in funding, ipod during the pandemic when it was in its heyday, and now is being scooped up by SAP. Rocco, I'm curious just to get your take on how you're translating this news, what it means for change enablers.

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Rocco Seyboth [00:04:12]:

Yeah, I mean, walk me actually created this category called digital adoption platforms. And so that Ken, that description that you just gave of what walk me does, in theory, that's the sort of like checklist of things that any digital adoption platform should do, right? So it overlays on top of the business application to a lot of employees experiencing it. They don't even know they're experiencing a digital adoption platform. It just feels like it's part of the CRM or the ERP. And while Walk me pioneered that category 50, at least, digital adoption platforms out there now. And so I thought the first interesting thing was that we better just introduce the category to our listeners because I have a lot of friends in it, Ops L and D. And they hadn't, I asked them about the acquisition, they hadn't heard of Walkme. They weren't familiar with digital adoption platforms.

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Rocco Seyboth [00:05:01]:

So Ken gave a great overview of what they do. The other part of DaP 101 to know is that there's two types of digital adoption platforms. There's ones that are designed for software vendors to make it easier for their end customers to use the software, and then there's ones that are more focused on helping enterprises make it easier for their employees to adopt their internal processes. So Walkme is a little more oriented towards the latter category. They're more for enterprises and internal employees. There's a really big Dapp called Pendo that's probably the leader on the other side, focused more on software vendors and customers. So now you know what adapt is as a change enabler. If you're not previously familiar with Dapps, I mean, you should really go down a rabbit hole this weekend and learn a little more because it's one of the most important types of technology you can have in your training and enablement tech stack.

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Rocco Seyboth [00:06:07]:

And yet it's nowhere near as well known as some of the other tools we have in the tech stack, like a knowledge base or a learning management system. And for most organizations, if you have a few hundred employees or more, you probably would have a digital adoption platform to complement your knowledge base and your LMS. So that's the first important thing that I found out was this news is huge to us, but not all of my friends that are responsible for training and enablement knew what it was.

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Ken Babcock [00:06:36]:

Yeah. And I think just to add a little bit more color to that, and I think why the category sort of lacks awareness. I've been on those calls too, Rocco, where you say, do you know about Dapps with the digital adoption platforms? And then people look at you like, okay, that just sounds like a bunch of business jargon pieced together to form a category. The reason why I think DAP lacks the brand awareness that it probably deserves is that it has historically served super large companies. And the reason for that is tools like Walkme. Theres another one out there that serves the internal use case called what fix is a really expensive products. Theres an implementation cost. You need developers on the backend to build the products in.

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Ken Babcock [00:07:21]:

There's ongoing sort of content creation that needs to be provisioned and maintained. And so it's not super dynamic. The implementation costs can be very high and the overall cost of the software can be really high. And so that means that lots of companies, let's just throw out a threshold. If you're under 5000 people, you probably don't know about the DAP category because you're priced out of it.

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Rocco Seyboth [00:07:43]:

Yeah.

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Ken Babcock [00:07:44]:

And so that's a lot of, you know, to put a shameless plug on Tango, we're focused on that internal use case and we think that digital adoption, software adoption is a need that's present across all types of customers. And so what we're trying to do is effectively bring this category down market, if you want to call it that, or at least bring awareness to the companies that historically have been underserved by DAP.

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Rocco Seyboth [00:08:11]:

Yeah. The reason digital adoption platforms are having a moment right now and the SAP acquisition of walk me is just one example of the moment the Dapps are having. The reason digital adoption platforms are having a moment right now is because there's a lot of inherent issues that both change enablers and employees complain about when you're relying exclusively on knowledge bases and learning management systems to deploy and organize training and enablement content. The biggest complaint that we hear, and in theory a digital adoption platform will solve is that all the knowledge in the KB and the LMS is not in the flow of work. So if I'm in the middle of a software process and I don't know what to do, I forgot what button to click next. I don't know what I'm supposed to type into this field. I've got to stop what I'm doing, leave the CRM or ERP that I'm working in and go search that knowledge base or find that video in the learning management system. Watch it.

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Rocco Seyboth [00:09:14]:

And not only does that interrupt my flow, but I may not find the information I'm looking for right away. I may have to watch a 15 minutes video to get the knowledge of one little step. That should only take me 5 seconds to do. And employees find that really painful. And so what people love about Dapps and why SAP felt like all of their customers needed to have a digital adoption experience integrated into their ERP products is because they put that knowledge in context at the exact moment the employee needs it at their fingertips. So they don't have to leave what they're doing. They don't have to watch a 15 minutes video to complete a single step. That should only take 5 seconds.

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Ken Babcock [00:10:00]:

I think that's really, really well said. And not to mention, you know, we've been talking about this through the lens of, you know, hey, walk me embedding into a single product, multiply that across your tech stack. You're not going to put in an LMS or a knowledge base. Like here's what all the widgets, all the tools that we use, uh, here's where they live and here's what they do. Like, it just doesn't make sense to have that in a far away repository. It needs to be right there on the page. And so I think its a really savvy acquisition by SAP. Rocco, I dont know if youve ever looked at this Wikipedia page for SAP.

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Ken Babcock [00:10:35]:

The list of products that SAP builds and sells independently is unbelievable. I mean, we should have it scroll during this episode, but like, there are hundreds of products in here which feels insane for one company to produce those. But is not that insane if you look internally under the hood at a company and say, okay, what is your tech stack look like? You know what, it probably is hundreds of tools. And so in a lot of ways, SAP is buying Walkme because like their stack of what they build is hundreds of tools that they need to enable.

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Rocco Seyboth [00:11:13]:

Yeah. By the way, that's why I'm giving this story five mangoes, because I think while it is a great move for SAP to acquire walk me and integrate walkme into all their dozens or hundreds of products, by the way, SAP claims that they're going to continue to allow walkme customers to use walk me digital adoption technology across all of their softwares, including non SAP softwares. We'll see if that remains true over time. It's tough when that happens to can, you know, put the same energy into Oracle and workday ERP software as you would put into supporting walk me on your own SAP software. But they claim they're going to do that. But the reason I think this is a five mango story for change enablers is SAP is signaling something to you that you need to be aware of and hopefully you already knew, but that the software vendors have been trying to keep secret. There's a huge conspiracy among all enterprise software vendors. What they've decided to do is build as many features as possible so they can accommodate as many customer requests as possible.

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Rocco Seyboth [00:12:25]:

And in building features, they make these big, complicated products. SAP has 100 products because they literally couldn't jam all the features in, so they had to keep building more and more products. And yet what they claim is that their software is super easy to use. It requires very minimal training. You can get it up and running very quickly and you can do it all yourself without help from any outside experts. And that the generic training they provide in their knowledge base or their videos is going to work for your specific organization. Every single enterprise software company says that. And yet what SAP is signaling to you, and what I think is true not just of SAP products, but other enterprise software, is that maybe that's not true.

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Rocco Seyboth [00:13:16]:

If you ask SAP customers, even the ones that spend tens of millions a year and renew year after year, they will tell you that SAP products and other ERPs and CRM customers will say the same. They'll say that these products are very complicated. So they're critical to running our business, but they are very complicated. They are highly customizable. We can't deploy our ERP or CRM the way any other customer did. Our processes are extremely customized to our business and when you get into it, you realize that you actually need a lot more than just the generic training and usually a lot more time to get up and running than you think. That enterprise software companies have previously signaled this in the past buy. And a lot of times most enterprise software companies have an in house system integration or services arm.

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Rocco Seyboth [00:14:11]:

A lot of times they have acquired third party system integrators or professional services businesses because most of their customers end up needing that. And this SAP acquisition of Walkme is another signal that if your software sales rep is telling you, super easy to get up and running and requires minimal training, minimal change management, and we have out of the box training that will help your employees use the system, you should scrutinize that and be very careful to take that on face value.

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Ken Babcock [00:14:41]:

Yeah, ease of use and intuitive are probably the most abused, abused phrases in any new product release. So I totally buy it. I think SAP is probably from the ilk of software vendors where they are fulfilling requirements. Theyre not as focused on building user experiences that are minimal and provide a core job to be done. Instead, they have, like you said, responded to what customers have asked for time and time again. You just have this crazy portal with all these widgets that you need to be able to navigate. I think the purchase makes sense a little bit on walkme. I know we're not financial analysts here, but it's an interesting acquisition from the perspective of walk me walkme.

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Ken Babcock [00:15:30]:

If you bought stock when they ipo'd, your stock's down about 52%. And so walk me. Also, similarly, high implementation costs, high licensing costs, and they haven't really cracked the nut on making that value proposition for customers beyond maybe the biggest customers out there. And so it's an interesting dynamic.

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Rocco Seyboth [00:15:53]:

I think the other reason the stock is down is while again, this is not what SAP is saying, so let's give them maybe a chance to follow through on what they're saying. But I think most customers and most people in the training and enablement world are looking at this as a way for Walkme to add value to SAP customers, not for SAP to add value to walk me customers. So if you are using non SAP products, despite the fact that SAP is saying they're going to support non SAP products and competitive CRMs and erps, I don't think the market believes that. And that would be my guess why the stock is tanking.

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Ken Babcock [00:16:33]:

Yeah, and we've heard that from Walkme customers that aren't an SAP house. They're very worried about how they're going to be supported moving forward because their teams have become pretty dependent and reliant on walkmes capabilities. So we will see how it plays out. Rocco, I totally agree with you. Five mangoes. I mean, we should only really be bringing five mangoes stories to this section, but this is a five for five for sure. SAP, we talked about one of their biggest products is an ERP product, and a lot of the products on that Wikipedia page are just extensions of ERP. We had someone comment on one of our LinkedIn posts.

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Ken Babcock [00:17:14]:

I believe it was maybe one of the LinkedIn posts I shared. We had someone comment about famous ERP disasters. I was shocked that this article exists, but there is an article out there. We'll share it in the show notes, twelve ERP disasters. And so in the spirit of SAP, in fact, of those twelve, eight of them mentioned SAP. So, yeah, purely a coincidence. We talk about how cumbersome these products are, and then lo and behold, they actually create some negative outcomes along the way, too. Eight out of twelve mentioned SAP.

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Ken Babcock [00:17:55]:

And so Rocco and I basically said that, you know what? Let's pick some of our favorites that we read or some of the most interesting ones and actually talk about them.

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Rocco Seyboth [00:18:04]:

Yeah, producer Danielle asked us to choose one each, and I reject the premise of that because ever since I read these articles, some of these stories have been living rent free in my mind. And I had a very difficult time choosing just one. So I was able to narrow it down.

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Ken Babcock [00:18:21]:

We'll give you two.

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Rocco Seyboth [00:18:22]:

I was able to narrow it down to two. Ken, we'll give you nothing.

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Ken Babcock [00:18:25]:

Producer Danielle, how about you share your first one, then I'll share the one that I liked, and then we'll come back to you.

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Rocco Seyboth [00:18:32]:

I'm pretty sure you weren't going to pick this one because, spoiler alert, the end of the first story I'm going to share involves a CEO getting fired. So, and I don't know if we're planning to migrate. We're pretty happy with our ERP. We won't say what it is, but we're pretty happy with it. But be careful, because if you're an executive or even a CEO and you mess up the ERP project, you can get fired, ousted from your board like the CEO of Invicare did. So Invicare is a medical device manufacturer, and they were using an older legacy version of an SAP ERP, by the way, we're really not trying to pick on SAP. They're in a lot of these stories because they are one of the leaders in the ERP space, so they have a lot of customers, and that's a testament to the fact that they build great features for their customers. But Invicare was migrating to a modern version of an SAP ERP from a legacy version, and they needed to do that because the legacy ERP was making it difficult for them to ship new products and to streamline and cut costs from their supply chain.

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Rocco Seyboth [00:19:53]:

So that's what prompted this migration. And after a few months, they had to stop, and they cited some challenges with the planning and execution in the project of migrating to the new ERP. Now, the board was not happy with that, but the next thing they found out that the board was even less happy with is that, like we said, these ERP systems are complicated. So Invacare had to hire a system integrator consulting partner to help them with this transition and this migration. And unfortunately for Invacare, they had to pay that system integrator for six months to do nothing, even while they weren't doing their migration. So the board was really unhappy with that. And in general, unfortunately, that CEO was forced out by the board, and it probably was very complicated. It probably had a lot more to do with than just this ERP migration.

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Rocco Seyboth [00:20:56]:

But the article says that, in part, the board didn't feel like that CEO had a handle on this company's digital transformation, and that was a top priority, and so they had to find a new CEO. So if you didn't think that the stakes were high for you as an executive, or if you're an operational executive who's not technical and you think the buck for digital transformation stops at the CIO, you're wrong. In some cases, the buck stops with the CEO. And so the stakes are very high.

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Ken Babcock [00:21:29]:

How do you feel about that? Also? Yeah, also, maybe if you're a CEO who you're like, man, I'm really not fit for this job, just switch your ERP, and then maybe you'll find yourself a happier exit path.

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Rocco Seyboth [00:21:40]:

Does that feel fair to you, Kent?

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Ken Babcock [00:21:42]:

No, but. But it does. I mean, we're going to talk about this a little bit later. I pulled out some cost figures that were mentioned in this article. It is shocking. It is shocking what some of these ERP disasters contributed to. So stick around. The one that I'm going to share, it's a Pennsylvania manufacturing company called Worth and company Mechanical Contractor.

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Ken Babcock [00:22:04]:

Other companies use them as sort of a. An OEM, but they were also migrating their ERP. And I think this story was kind of a tale as old as time, which is the delayed go live date. And so they had picked Oracle as their ERP. They were gung ho about November 2015. We were going to do this. They also hired a third party contractor to help them implement the ERP that eventually got pushed to February 2016. Now, that's not crazy.

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Ken Babcock [00:22:34]:

You know, four months, holidays, somewhere in the middle. That delay probably doesn't shock anybody, but 2016 comes and goes. They fire the third party contractor, they bring in another third party contractor, because, by the way, there are people out there who make their careers out of implementing erps. That is how clunky, and that is how clunky they are, is that they need that expertise. And so then it got pushed to 2017. 2017 comes and goes. No new ERP. They had to fire the second contractor, focused on implementation, and eventually this thing gets abandoned.

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Ken Babcock [00:23:12]:

And what happens with worth and company over this timeframe, where, keep in mind, this ERP did not even go live. They paid Oracle $4.5 million for licensing, professional services, training. Obviously, none of that was really realized, but they had to pay for it. And so they took Oracle to court in 2019 after the project was abandoned. And as of this article date, which I don't think is too recent, it's not 2024, but as of that article date, that case was still in court. And so I think this is just, the stakes are high. Yes, it's related to what you shared, but it's also these things can kind of be like a snowball rolling down a hill where it's like, oh, things get delayed. We don't have the right partner.

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Ken Babcock [00:23:59]:

We select a new partner. They're not the right partner. We're paying for this software as it goes. And then all of a sudden you realize, hey, you know what? Four years have gone by and we haven't implemented the ERP. That might not even be like the most updated version of what we need now. So that one scared me. That's the one that gave me goosebumps.

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Rocco Seyboth [00:24:20]:

This is a common thing we see from our customers. So there's two reasons why large scale software rollouts fail. Whether it's an ERP or CRM or some other important system of record, the most common scenario where it fails is actually one that's often the least expected. And that is a lot of migrations fail because of data or technology. There's a technical problem mapping things from the old system to the new system. There's a migration problem. There's data quality issues, and that's the one that companies tend to focus on, actually. Unfortunately, the bigger reason why these projects fail is because of employee change management.

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Rocco Seyboth [00:25:01]:

Doesn't matter how many great features that new ERP or CRM has if you can't get your employees to use it. And this scenario where we have to run two erps or two CRMs side by side for a very long period of time while we try to do the migration, that is a nightmare for employees who already barely can be bothered to properly complete processes to begin with, let alone trying to figure out the change involved in a new system or operating two systems side by side. So unfortunately, this scenario where we underestimate the amount of human change management involved in a technology migration, kills a lot of projects. Actually, this next story I'm going to share involves both data quality issues and employee change management tanking an ERP rollout. So everybody knows. And if you're like me, you love target, my wife loves target, my kids love target. We like wandering around Target. In fact, literally right now I think it's Target circle week.

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Rocco Seyboth [00:26:02]:

So hopefully you've seen some of those awesome Kristen wie commercials. So the last nightmare we're going to share from this article, which we would encourage you to check out, is about target Canada. Target Canada also on a legacy SAP ERP migrating to a new SAP ERP. And they had a creative idea to avoid data migration issues. They said, you know what? We're not going to migrate any data from our legacy ERp to our new erpental. That could cause a lot of problems. You know what we're going to do instead? We're going to hire an army of entry level data input specialists, and we are just going to have them manually move all the data the hard way, the brute force way, from the old system to the new system. And that's actually novel and interesting, and maybe it would have worked if the execution hadn't failed.

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Rocco Seyboth [00:26:59]:

Ultimately, Target Canada had such disruption with their ERP that the article says their supply chain collapsed, so they could not get things into the stores, they could not serve their customers countrywide. Huge problem. Now, this is actually probably one of the stories that informed SAP's move to buy walkme, because the digital adoption platform would have actually really helped target candidate here. When you hire junior employees who are brand new, have had minimal training, have minimal experience with both the old and the new system, and are lacking context into the overall business objective, which most many junior employees are lacking, then you are likely ending up with these data quality issues. Even if everything is perfect. Some of these forms and data entries have dozens or hundreds of steps. And if you get one little field wrong, it destroys the entire entry. And so it's really hard to get this right with junior employees.

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Rocco Seyboth [00:28:10]:

This is one of the things a digital adoption platform can do. A digital adoption platform can have guidance at every single step, every single button click, and every single field that needs to be filled out, telling that junior employee what they should and shouldn't enter here, linking them to videos and resources if they need to get more context for the tasks that they're working on in that moment. And so I wouldn't be surprised if this public disaster with a very beloved brand like Target is one of the data points that led SAP to acquire walkme.

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Ken Babcock [00:28:45]:

Yeah. Awesome. I mean, thanks for sharing that, Rocco. The target one is, I feel like it's highlighted in this story, but that's got to be so common. I think of some of my earliest internships and I was doing manual data entry, and I probably wasn't aware of the stakes, wasn't even really aware of what I was doing. I was just following along with some instructions that were probably incomplete. I would encourage everybody to take a look at this article. Like I said, we're going to share it.

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Ken Babcock [00:29:13]:

Things that stood out to me, I'm just going to highlight some cost figures that came up in this article about failed ERP implementations. 6.5 million in implementation costs, 22.2 million in annual profit loss as a result of an ERP failure, 3.8 million for a consultant, $100 million lawsuit, seven years of implementation accruing 500, I think it was euros. €500 in costs and a hundred million dollar tax write off as a result of an ERP project. And so that just gives you a sense for, like Rocco said, the stakes are high. The stakes are high, yes, if youre the CEO, but also in terms of cost. So give that one a look. Our next segment, the Ops hotline. So in this segment, Rocco is actually going to share a question that we got.

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Ken Babcock [00:30:12]:

Tango got it. From a customer perspective, customer thinking about how digital adoption might be able to change how they do business, how they enable their teams. So Rocco is going to share that question. Were going to give a live response.

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Rocco Seyboth [00:30:25]:

Yeah. Not only is this a real customer, an operations manager from a very large multinational real estate corporation with tens of thousands of employees, I actually personally had a chance to speak to her. So I'll share her question, share her challenges and share some of the ideas I tried to give her to get through. So the question is, can a digital adoption platform replace our learning management system? So the answer, of course, Ken, is it depends. Depending on what you need, there are times when it's right for you to have a digital adoption platform work with your learning management system. But it turns out in the case of this real estate organization, it's going to be better for them to have a digital adoption platform replace their current learning management system. Let's talk about why and how you can figure out which scenario is right for your company. So why did they want to get rid of their learning management system to begin with? This particular customer asked to remain anonymous because she did not have very many good things to say about their learning management system.

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Rocco Seyboth [00:31:38]:

Trainul trainual is a popular LMS. They have thousands of customers, some of whom probably really like their product. Unfortunately, this operations manager didn't have, and her main complaints were both ease of use issues that she experiences being the main administrator and content creator for train ul. But also she was hearing a lot of complaints from their employees for her personally. She found that most if you're not familiar with learning management systems, they are great for creating courses. So you can create courses based usually on videos or slides. And at the end, your employees answer questions to determine whether or not they retain the information right. And so that's a popular form of training, which is why there's many learning management systems out there that are trusted by large organizations.

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Rocco Seyboth [00:32:34]:

The downside though is that video based training can be pretty cumbersome for the change. Enabler, process, expertise, who's responsible for that? It is true that people love video, but they tend to like really engaging, highly polished video. So if you show up and your lighting is bad and you have a bad background, you have no graphics and you just drone for 15 minutes, maybe with a PowerPoint slide, those are not the types of videos that people really like. So to do a good job in a video that people will watch, it takes a lot of work. And then of course, the other problem with video that she talked about is the moment anything changes, you have to re record the entire video. So she was struggling to keep content up to date. What she was saying that her employees didn't like was that they would watch these videos and take these tests and not get a chance to use that knowledge they had learned for weeks or months and then completely forget it. And then they would have to go back and watch an entire video, or just inevitably find some other way to get the knowledge, like asking for help, opening a ticket, interrupting a coworker or interrupting her, asking her to do a live zoom or a teams meeting.

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Rocco Seyboth [00:33:50]:

And so these are some of the reasons why she was considering replacing trainual. In the end. Here's how you can decide if you need a digital adoption platform, a learning management system, or both. So what this large real estate organization ended up doing is taking a lot of that content that was in their lms, the videos and some of the nuggets of wisdom from the slides, and actually using the tango digital adoption platform just to pin them right to the spots in their business applications where that knowledge is relevant and where it can be used in the flow of work. Right? So one of the examples she had is there was a short video on how to fill out a new client record for some of the agents in the field. So instead of having new agents watch that video, and then if they don't have a new customer for a few weeks or a few months, having to go back and watch it again, or try to remember, they just pin that short video to the button in their CRM where the real estate agent clicks to create a new client record. And so that is the benefit of the Dapp. So what's interesting about this case study is they're using a lot of the same content that was in the learning management system, but delivering it in what they believe is a better way, which is in the flow of work through the digital adoption platform.

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Rocco Seyboth [00:35:18]:

So for them, the right decision was cancel trainual, move that content, deploy it through tooltips. In the flow of work with Tango, the tango digital adoption platform. For many organizations, though, one or the other is not the answer. A lot of organizations want to provide all that context and knowledge upfront for new employees. Learning management systems are great for organizing that fire hose of information for new employees when they first come onto your company. And then you'll take smaller subsets of that information and put it in the flow of work in your business applications through a digital adoption platform. So for a lot of you, having both working together side by side is actually the answer.

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Ken Babcock [00:36:02]:

You are so kind. I have a hotter take on lmss.

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Rocco Seyboth [00:36:06]:

Let's hear it. Ken.

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Ken Babcock [00:36:08]:

I think lmss exist as a result of two things, poor outcome measurement, particularly on process adoption, because it's like, well, I actually don't know if people are going to be successful. And so, well, let's do a checkbox sort of attitude towards that and create an lms that we can say, all right, everybody went through the training, so they must be good, but it's detached from the actual outcomes when they're in the software. I agree with you, LMS can be great for like compliance training. Maybe things that are less process oriented and tactical. But I would say when a team exclusively relies on their LMS, it's usually because they have an inability to attach what they're trying to get people to do to the actual business outcomes that they're trying to drive. So that's my hot take. But yeah, they can coexist.

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Rocco Seyboth [00:37:02]:

Yeah, you're absolutely right. I get asked this question all the time. What do I need? Do I need a knowledge base? Do I need a digital adoption platform? Or do I need a learning management system? And the first question you should always ask yourself if you're not sure which one you need is what is the desired outcome? Are you looking to create a single repository of information that people can search through? If so, you need a knowledge base. Are you looking to check the box to prove that people viewed and in the moment understood certain types of content? If so, you need a learning management system. Are you looking to see actual process adoption like the process was followed correctly and completed correctly? If so, you need a digital adoption platform.

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Ken Babcock [00:37:46]:

Yep, totally. Well, speaking of spicy, we're going to wrap this up with one last section that we call spicy nuggets. And we honestly, we kind of just created this section because we had a video that we posted to Tango's TikTok Instagram that went viral. We got about 30 million views of this video. If you're watching the video recording, you're about to see it. If you haven't watched the video recording, I'm going to tell you what it is. It's a cat slapping another cat. And basically what the reason why that cat is slapping the other cat is because that one cat trained the other cat on something and the other cat forgot how to do it, which is talk about tails oldest time.

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Ken Babcock [00:38:28]:

The engagement on this video was ridiculous. So to wrap up the episode, we're just going to share some of our favorites. Favorite comments that we saw come up.

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Rocco Seyboth [00:38:37]:

We're not suggesting violence here. If you have ambivalent adopters in your company who refuse to read the documentation that you created for them for how to do something, and they ask you the same question over and over again, please don't hit them. And yet, I'd say about half of the comments of this video where change Enabler saying, I wish I could hit this ambivalent adopter when they asked me that same question for the 11th time. We're not going to share any of those comments cause they were too obvious.

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Ken Babcock [00:39:12]:

Well, Sarah's comment though, I mean, it shows the level of rage that can happen when you've showed somebody how to do something and they forget how to do it. Her comment was, in those moments, my mantra fills my head. I have bills. Alcohol is not free. They don't have Red Bull in jail. Stay calm. And so she's walking herself off the plank. Uh, that one absolutely cracked me.

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Intro/Outro [00:39:36]:

Can.

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Rocco Seyboth [00:39:36]:

Alcohol is not free. I can confirm that alcohol is not.

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Ken Babcock [00:39:39]:

Free, and they don't have Red Bull in jail. That's new information to me, but that makes sense.

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Rocco Seyboth [00:39:45]:

Yeah, I really identified with Zoe. She said, I'm embarrassed to say I'm that coworker. Working memory issues from ADHD is a real thing. I am the charter founding member of the ambivalent adopter club. Some people around tango call me skeptical Sam, but basically, if I can't figure out how to do something in about 3 seconds, then I start to scream. And if someone isn't available to help, hold my hand and walk me through it, then I give up immediately and just move on with my life. So I definitely feel where Zoe is coming from. Thanks for.

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Rocco Seyboth [00:40:29]:

This is a safe space, Zoe, so thanks for outing yourself. You're not alone.

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Ken Babcock [00:40:34]:

You know what's funny, Rocco? When you joined Tango, we asked you if you had any nicknames, and you said, no. My name is Rocco. Rocco is my nickname. Guess what? We gave you a nickname. We gave you skeptical Sam, which makes no sense because your name is Rocky.

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Rocco Seyboth [00:40:49]:

Skeptical Sam, the ambit adopter.

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Ken Babcock [00:40:52]:

The last one I'll share. As we close out the episode, we had a comment from Breeze Breeze's profile photos of dogs. Maybe this is a dog commenting on our TikTok. The problem also stems from frequency of process. If you do it once in a blue moon, people forget. Best to have clearly written instructions on your policy manual. I loved this one because the reality of most ambivalent adopters, when you talk about an ERP or a CRM or an HRIs or an ATS, majority of users aren't going to be using that day in and day out. It's not something that's core to their job responsibilities.

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Ken Babcock [00:41:30]:

They need to interact with it in these moments, and they need to be successful in those moments. The expectation that we put on people is that they memorize it. And every time they come back to it, whether it's monthly or quarterly or yearly, they don't forget. But the reality is, what if you could just turn your brain off, follow something, and ensure every single time that you do it the right way? I think that's okay. I think sometimes we're afraid of doing enabling a behavior like that, because we're like, oh, well, that's laziness. There's a virtue of memorizing process, but it shouldn't be that way. Like, let's just help people be successful.

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Rocco Seyboth [00:42:10]:

I appreciate breeze. They're coming from the right place. And yet, breeze, I'm never going to read the entire policy manual. So, like, that, too. Like Angela, beloved Angela is our operations leader in charge of training at Tango. And what she started doing was taking the little nugget of wisdom that used to live in the policy manual, in our knowledge base and notion, and sticking it right in the area of the software that I couldn't figure out how to use. So that that little bit of knowledge that I need is right there when I need it. And after she started doing that, I scream at Angela a lot less and her and I could just be friends now.

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Ken Babcock [00:42:51]:

Yes, you and Angela being friends, that is a good thing for tango and everyone that wraps up the state of change enablement. Thank you, everybody, for listening through it. We hope you had as much fun as Rocco and I did. We'll be back whether you want us or not, for state of change enablement. For. And you know what, Rocco? I feel like we changed the trajectory. We're not going downhill.

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Rocco Seyboth [00:43:10]:

We're timeless.

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Ken Babcock [00:43:11]:

The charm, Ken, we're always on the rise. So thanks, everybody. We'll talk to you soon.

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Intro/Outro [00:43:20]:

Thanks for listening to this episode of Change Enablers, a podcast by Tango. If you like what you heard, share with a comment or leave us a review. And don't forget to subscribe for more episodes. See you next time.

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