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The Hidden Cost of Immature Processes in Technology Adoption

Organizations continue to invest heavily in technology to improve efficiency, visibility, and cost control. Yet, many organizations still struggle to realize meaningful returns on these investments and realize a fraction of their potential return due to immature adoption processes. The experience of FTI Consulting across large-scale projects worldwide shows that these challenges are not unique to any one sector. They persist across industries and project types, silently eroding value and preventing organizations from achieving the full potential of their digital initiatives. Drawing on the extensive experience of FTI Consulting across Latin America, the United Kingdom (“UK”), and other regions, in this article we provide insights into identifying and addressing these challenges in adoption of new technology to maximize technology investments.

Immature processes in technology adoption function like latent defects in a building – invisible during construction yet devastating over the asset’s lifetime. The cumulative financial impact is substantial, with the UK construction sector currently reporting between 2-5% of total project budget spent on inefficient digital processes,¹ which produce fragmented workflows, inconsistent practices, and limited documentation and reduce productivity by up to 15%.² In Latin America, although 57% of companies increased their investments in digital transformation over the past year, 70% of these projects fail, often because organizations have not clearly defined their objectives or assessed their readiness to undertake a digital transformation initiative.³

What Are the Immature Processes in Technology Adoption

Over the course of our involvement in global projects, FTI Consulting has identified several recurring patterns of process immaturity that undermine technology adoption. Use of digital tools often varies across functions involved in a project or across an organization. We have consistently observed a lack of standardization—each business unit or region operates differently. There is also frequently limited interoperability and a lack of common data standards across the software solutions being used. Furthermore, many organizations lack clear governance and accountability, leading to ad-hoc decision-making focused on resolving issues rather than preventing them. The reality is that is that it takes time, cost and requires effort to adopt digital tools.

One of the most common manifestations of this process immaturity occurs when organizations plan technology implementations under the assumption that all functions operate in the same way, without fully accounting for regional, functional, or business-unit variations. When key stakeholders are not engaged early to surface these differences, the resulting solution often fails to truly unify and standardize processes or address the specific needs of each line of business—ultimately limiting end-user adoption and reducing the overall value of the implementation.

This challenge became evident in a project for a client in the mining industry. After completing the requirements-gathering phase and evaluating several cost-control solutions, the client ultimately decided to use a local tool for project governance and funding requests, and a separate tool for cost control. However, during the configuration phase, the client began to question the use of the cost-control tool and shifted their priority entirely to the local solution, which was not originally designed for cost management. As a result, the client requested the configuration team to develop new cost-control functionality from scratch within the local tool, rather than using the tool specifically designed for that purpose and integrating it with the ERP system. This scope change during the configuration phase increased the overall project cost and timeline, as it significantly altered the scope of work defined at the beginning of the project.

Where the Real Financial Impact Lies – What We Discovered Working on International Projects

In technology enablement, we have identified common patterns of underlying issues that repeatedly occur across industries and geographies. Many organizations also tend to have limited metrics, which prevents them from consistently measuring performance or outcomes. Finally, there is often a lack of clarity around end requirements and goals. Teams frequently do not understand what the priorities are, what the final state should look like, or what the expected timeline is. Additionally, in some cases, the function leading a transformation project does not have an organizational change management team to keep stakeholders and end users informed about the project’s status. As a result, stakeholders and end users are often unaware of key dates and their roles within the project.

One clear example involved a client in the oil and gas sector that aimed to implement a solution to track investments from initiation through the in-service date across three different segments. The company began implementation of the tool, initially focused on estimating functionality and used by only one business segment. The company later decided to expand the scope of the project by adding more modules and incorporating the needs of the remaining two business segments. The requirements-gathering phase took longer than planned because the teams were not well organized and followed different procedures. In several instances, the company had to revisit internal discussions to align on processes. This delay pushed the start of the design phase back by two weeks. Additionally, during design-phase demos, requirements continued to change, and it became apparent that the overall scope had not been fully defined. These challenges persisted into the configuration phase, requiring the technical team to hold additional internal meetings and repeatedly adjust the solution to accommodate changing requirements. As a result, the project took longer than planned, and the issues ultimately led to an increase in the overall project budget.

How To Prevent Cost Escalation Driven by Inappropriate or Immature Adoption Practices

We’ve observed that many companies in the Americas and Europe begin digital transformation initiatives before establishing standardized processes, governance frameworks, stage gates for project fund disbursements, or clear performance metrics.

In line with ISO best practices, adoption should begin with clarity of purpose and defined processes. As outlined in ISO 9001 management principles, successful adoption begins with a clear understanding of organizational needs, defined processes, and measurable objectives—technology should enable these foundations, not replace them. For this reason, and depending on an organization’s maturity level, degree of process standardization, and alignment with market best practices, we typically begin not with a technology implementation but with a capacity maturity assessment. This assessment helps determine where the company currently stands, where it should go first, and which recommendations to prioritize to achieve structured processes, stronger cross-functional communication, and an overall maturity level that will allow the organization to fully realize the value of a technology implementation.

Quick Wins and Interventions To Make the Most of Impact

Quick wins and successful interventions are typically derived from project maturity and readiness to accept the change being implemented. Broadly speaking, the areas of improvement can be targeted by bringing clarity in governance, defining measurable objectives, and introducing simple ISO-style stage gates with criteria for define, design, configure, test and deploy that are a pass or fail check.

Using one standard template to map all functions and to capture processess may streamline the intervention process. A mandate for one common data standard and a simple change-control rule or requirement can directly target change control management and cost escalations. It is important to align digital workflows to existing process models so that the system automation recognizes good practice rather than creating parallel workarounds.

Our approach during the initial pre-design phase begins with definition of a project need, focused on collecting and documenting requirements. Once the requirements are defined, design development, configuration, testing, training, deployment of the configuration and data migration, go-live, and post–go-live support. This initial process of documenting requirements is imperative to successful process implementation as it is the basis for successful configuration setup.

Conclusion

The cost of immature technology adoption is not hypothetical—it is measurable, recurring, and largely avoidable. Across every sector and geography we have worked in, the pattern is the same: organizations rush to implement technology before their processes, governance, and people are ready, and they pay the price in budget overruns, delayed timelines, and unrealized value. The solution is not to slow down digital transformation, but to start it in the right place. Assessing organizational maturity before any implementation begins is not a delay—it is the most effective investment an organization can make to ensure that every dollar spent on technology actually delivers a return.

Footnotes:

1: Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors. (2024). Digitalisation in construction report 2024. RICS.

2: Maier, J. (2017). Made Smarter Review. Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.

3: Link.