Welcome to a brand new season of the Digital Adoption Show, your go-to podcast for inspiring stories of execution and growth. I’m Arijit, Director of Sales at Whatfix, and your host today. This season, we aim to uncover fresh perspectives and engage in thought-provoking discussions, bringing you insights from top industry leaders in HR and L&D.
In today’s episode, we’re exploring five hacks to maximize knowledge management efficiency with digital adoption platforms. We’re joined by a very special guest, Dr. Thomas Blumer, the Director of Knowledge Management at QAD. Without any further delay, let’s get to know our guest.

Introducing Dr. Thomas Blumer

In his previous role, Thomas managed global teams and programs focused on increasing customer value through digital adoption, AI, and machine learning. With over 20 years in the field, he has a solid background in developing global knowledge management and learning strategies. His leadership in global cross-functional teams has delivered value to employees, business partners, and customers.

Thomas has also worked for several Fortune 500 companies, where he excelled in implementing KM solutions and optimizing cost accounting. His commitment to professional development keeps him at the forefront of digital transformation and AI advancements. Welcome, Thomas. It’s great to have you here.

“Thank you for the nice introduction. Really great to be here.”

The Digital Pulse: Connecting Passion and Profession

Let’s kick off this new season with our new segment called The Digital Pulse. This is where we try to connect the dots between passion and profession, uncovering how individual journeys shape visionary leadership. Speaking of journeys, Thomas, is there a passion or activity outside of work that’s particularly close to your heart?

“Well, apart from my kids, which is pretty much my passion, I love reading good books. I like learning new things. You know, I constantly push myself further to learn new things, explore new things, traveling, getting to know people. There are so many things, you know, I could fill a whole hour, but I hope you get the gist here.”

“Absolutely. Some of those same passions I share as well. What’s the last place you traveled to, Thomas?”

“I was actually in Zurich, my hometown in Switzerland. I traveled there with my two kids for the first time alone. That was an adventure by itself, as you can imagine, but they are two and four years old. So they’re still pretty small, but it was an excellent experience, you know.”

Triple Strike: A Glimpse Into Our Guest’s Personality

We’ve also revamped our rapid-fire questions to get a deeper glimpse into our guest’s personalities and insights. Now, this section of the Digital Adoption Show will be called Triple Strike, a lightning round of three quirky questions that will have you put on your thinking hat and respond instantly. Are you ready for our Triple Strike, Thomas?

“Yes, as ready as I will ever be.”

If you had to pick a color to describe your personality, what color would it be and why?

“Oh, color, color. Well, let me think about something you may not hear every day. I would say fuchsia, you know. Go to my LinkedIn page, and you’ll see I really like the color, but it also has some meaning. It’s cheerful, it’s confident, and it’s mature. And it actually reminds me of a funny joke because a politician was once asked the same question, and he said, ‘It’s fuchsia.’ And then the reporter asked, ‘Could you please spell fuchsia for me?’ And he said, ‘Oh no, no, no. My favorite color is red.’ I just thought that’s pretty funny.”

“All right, so which means I don’t have to ask you the color or the spelling of the color, at least now on the show. But that’s an interesting answer, actually. 

If your life were a movie genre, Thomas, what genre would it be and what would be the title of the movie?

“The genre is very easy. I would say sci-fi. I really love sci-fi. I spend much of my time, if I have time, watching sci-fi movies. The title, that’s a bit harder, but one of the classics is ‘When the Earth Stood Still.’ Maybe a spin-off of that, you know, like ‘When the Earth Starts Spinning Faster and Faster,’ kind of indicating the explosive growth of innovation we have right now. So maybe that could be an interesting title, you know.”

“Actually, it would be. Not sure what would happen to us if it goes faster, but that’s if you could invent a new holiday, and, you know, it’s apt for our conversation since we are recording this just before Christmas. 

If you could invent a new holiday, what would it celebrate?

“That’s an interesting one. Considering the previous question about sci-fi, maybe something like ‘Digital Silence Day.’ A day where you have to unplug from anything digital—no cell phones, no social media, no emails—to really reflect on the true values and the real relationships you have and should actually cherish more.”

“So, the non-digital adoption day, tongue in cheek for this show. Alright, that’s good. Actually, I would prefer that as well. That’s what I hope to do next week when I’m on holiday with my family, or at least what my wife expects me to do: to not check my emails on my phone. Hopefully, we get to that.”

Why don’t you tell us about your experience as a digital adoption, knowledge management, and training expert?

One of the challenges as an ERP company is to help onboard customers and employees very quickly, and we have done that in traditional ways, from classroom training to e-learning. And that was great. We saw a huge adoption jump there, but there was still something missing. We always felt people received the training at the wrong time, not when they really needed it. Once digital adoption platforms became available, it was like, “That’s what we need.” We can train people as they need it, inside the application. So we actually built a lot of training right in the application. And if that was not appropriate, because some use cases may be too complex, we could link them directly to the learning management system, right to the right place, so they don’t have to go and start looking like what traditional links normally do.

And if something changed, we could easily change it, because we still had control. It’s not a hard link like what you have in traditional systems. So by doing so, we could really move the needle. We increased onboarding time or decreased the time by 26%. Huge gains. Wow. Making that happen. Also, from call deflection for the support center, the first year, I think we closed about 26,000 support calls. It’s always hard to really measure exactly how many calls were avoided, but that’s a safe number. We felt very comfortable, but yeah, it was a huge game-changer for us.

Absolutely, Thomas, even when you talk about those 26,000 to 27,000 support calls, there are industry figures, right? It’s about $8 to $12 to resolve a call. So you just multiply that, and easily, you get the quantifiable value there. And when you talk about productivity gains at scale, the number of employees in the organization, this is tremendous quantitative value that we’re talking about.

Yeah. So, just for the $8 to $10, you know, I have seen different numbers. Now, if you think about an ERP system, you can’t solve anything for $8. Someone picks up the phone, you know, the issues are normally more complex. So we talk more about $150 for a support ticket, especially if an escalation is involved to R&D. It gets really expensive very quickly. And people work on the wrong thing instead of building new, exciting products.

Absolutely. I think that’s great.

And for our listeners who are actually new to this, could you explain what a digital adoption platform is and why it is crucial in today’s technology landscape?

Absolutely. A digital adoption platform, often created as a step, is a software overlay on top of your existing application. That can be a web application, a desktop application, or even a mobile application. Now, you might wonder, why would I need an overlay on my software I just purchased? Well, just think about how many times you got frustrated because it didn’t work the way you expected it to work or how much time you wasted finding a feature you know exists but don’t use all the time.

And that even happens when I use Instagram. Like, where is my saved image? And then you have to click five items till you see it. Now with DAP, you can automate that process. If that’s something which you do all the time or your organization needs to do all the time, you can now create your own button on any screens, which makes sense to go to these other screens you always have a hard time finding or is time-consuming. So you can actually modify your application without actually going to the code level to make your unique user experience much better.

And yeah, to your second part, why is it important right now? I mean, there’s so much change coming. There’s so much AI at the brink to be introduced. Now you have a tool to control AI. You can control other applications. And more importantly, you can actually see what’s happening in your organization. Many times people don’t even know how their own application is used, where it works well, where people struggle where people have a lot of errors.

Now you have all this visibility, and you can take actionable steps to help the situation with that. So I think it’s just a tremendous tool. Right. 

Very interesting. So it sounds like you can track user behavior and how they are using the system or how they should be using it, and also influence that behavior by setting up certain nudges or notifications, etc., that you mentioned earlier.

Yeah, just think about traditional UX sessions, you know, where you have a few people, or you interview them, and many times they kind of tell you what you want to hear, or they try to figure out what this application should do because they are embarrassed to really tell you how they abuse your system for another purpose. And now with that, you just see where they go and what they do. And sometimes like, why are they going there? And the insights we gain are quite amazing. So you can actually turn any user session into a potential UX session and learn from it.

So I think it’s super powerful. 

Absolutely. 

In terms of return on investment, what framework should organizations consider to effectively justify the adoption of DAP?

That’s a really good question and not really an easy one, but the base is always a Return on Investment calculation. I don’t think you can go to any board without having done the numbers, you know, thinking about call deflection, shortening your process time, lowering error rates, faster onboarding, and how much that will contribute to your organization.

I think that’s just the foundation. But then another thing, which some people don’t think about, is the cost of inaction. What is the cost of inaction if you don’t do it, and think about what will it cost you from a reputation or even a financial impact if someone uses an unsanctioned AI solution, you know, if there’s a data leak, what kind of cost does that generate for your company? And so you should also put a value to that. So that’s the second level. But then the third level, which I think people often fall short, which I think is super important, is storytelling. You know, like, what’s a compelling story, why you need DAP. 

And I can share a classic example from the nineties from Steve. You know, he was a lead of the World Bank, and back in the days, they didn’t have an internet presence. And rather than putting numbers together, why they should and how much it will cost to host a site, he instead provided a very compelling story of a little town somewhere in Africa, and they had this huge need for help.

But they couldn’t find the World Bank because they were not on the internet. How in the world could you find the World Bank if you don’t even have an internet presence? And so what people should remember is like, people forget numbers, but they remember stories. And if you have a really compelling story why DAP can really make a quantum leap in your organization, in addition to their ROI and the cost of inaction, I think then you have a really good package. 

So I will say, put those three together, bundle them, and present them, and you have a winning combination.

That’s actually nice, Thomas. So if I can paraphrase it, you could say people buy with emotion but justify it with numbers.

Absolutely. You know, I couldn’t say it better. So yes, absolutely, Arijit. 

That’s nice. I think the storytelling part, Thomas, is interesting because a lot of times we get deep into the numbers and you know what matters, but I think that part is missing a little bit, right, on the compelling reason for it eventually, why we need to have it.

With your extensive experience in the software sector, what are the most significant shifts you have seen around DAP and people’s perception of DAP? How does it differ from your own perception of it?

Yeah, you know, there’s a whole spectrum of people. When it comes to looking at that, on one side, you have people who have no idea what DAP is, and on the other side, you have experts like you and I, who have a lot of ideas what you could do. And I think the important piece or the interesting pieces are the people in the middle, who may have a wrong understanding of DAP, you know, who still think that DAP is just instruction step by step instructions. That was what DAP was. And I think that’s where my perception changes really kicked in. 

When we started, the biggest epiphany for me was the power of the data I suddenly had access to, you know, to make meaningful changes and have meaningful discussions.

Suddenly I wasn’t the guy on the receiving end in learning and development. I was actually on the strategic direction of our next product and say like, We see this problem, we should address them. It’s like, I can show you 500 people who struggle with that. Like, we need to talk about, you know, so that was a huge paradigm shift.

The other one is when you start, you normally start optimizing a single website or a single page, and it’s like, okay, we, we optimize, we have a help button here, or we connect the two items there. Then you start thinking about, well, actually the problem is not the page. It’s actually how the page is used in combination in a process, you know, and we found many pages, which were almost isolated.

There was no link to the presenting and ascending process steps, you know, and combining them, there was like, wow, that makes a huge difference. But now with DAP 2023, it got so much bigger. Now you can have end-to-end processes across different systems. And if you follow any TQM or lean management philosophy, you know, that a majority of work or time is actually spent in non-value activity.

Many times wait time. It’s just nothing does anything about it till the next thing happens. They have historically focused on the activity which happened, but now you can manage even the inactivities and actually start comparing like. Why does this process take three weeks in Europe, but five weeks in the United States is the same process and then you can actually start looking into that and improve it.

So I think this is a huge paradigm change and the last we already kind of talked a little bit about this now with AI in the mix, I think DAP and AI is just a winning combination. And that’s it. If people realize how much it can help I think this is a huge paradigm shift. We will see.

Sure. And I think that the point that you made there you could also say if you are able to figure out that waiting time, that is cost to the company, right? To whichever organization you can, you can, that’s opportunity cost. You can get more productive with that time or that time can be taken back for, you know, so I think that that makes sense a lot, which your point is accurate.

Few years back, folks did not see that. Okay. You save us five hours per day per employee, but what happens with that? Right. That’s where now we can start using that time as well. Yeah. Or, or looking from another perspective, it’s like, yes, you can reduce costs or it can be more effective, but you know, like you say, here’s where they have the first customer coming to your website and it starts a lead generation.

And the end is when he pays the invoice. If you can actually shorten that. You actually get the money or in your company actually helping your cash flow, you know, and now you actually a value driver rather than just focusing on the cost. And, you know, sometimes it’s just funny how management listens you bring in money.

And not listen as much if you can contribute to cost reduction, even cost reduction is so much more important because it goes very directly to your bottom line, but many times that thinking doesn’t really happen. So now that he can dab into both, I think that shows fantastic, you know, absolutely the order to cash, you know, time to it, the shorter the time, the better for the organization and time to serve becomes faster as well.

Absolutely. Okay, nice. 

Now, you know, reflecting on your past deployment experiences, you know, what kind of ROI value realization did you witness after having this deployed?

Yeah, so I think I already mentioned we had a 26 percent reduction in onboarding time, about 26,000 support tickets closed. Another really strong business case was we had to help uplifting a complex supply chain solution from one version to another.

And it was actually a generation change. You know, it was a big thing and we could shorten the time by months. You know, because we could be very specific, like a search and, you know, like when the feature was already available, we could already point them to the new feature, even in the old application, because they were parallel.

So you didn’t have to wait, like in the past, like now we jump over, we could actually bring them over where it was available and people really love that. And it made the whole transition so much less painful. And it’s like, I already use this tool and now. I can use it for everything. Wow. I really like it.

But in the past there was always like, no, let’s wait. Let’s wait. So these are really big things which the company appreciated. And we already talked about how we could help the UX team and product manager with meaningful conversations. I think that’s one of the numbers people kind of underestimate the strategic value proposition.

Now you can bring to the company. Based on your insights and I, I think we totally underestimated that when we started, we, we were just focusing on the call deflection and all that good thing and not really thinking that we can actually contribute to the strategic direction of product management. I think as you are.

Journey into DAP evolves. Your value drivers become more strategic, become bigger. It goes from just shielding support tickets to, you know, much bigger initiatives, like you said. I think that’s, that’s, that’s a good one. Okay. Yeah. And if I can add just one thing you know, DAP is a super powerful tool and it’s interesting to see what different companies are doing with it.

You know, it’s like, I think DAP by itself can do things, but to make really big improvements, you need to have a vision, you need to have ideas to really monetize on it, you know just because you have the tool, it still needs a kind of the experience behind it. It’s like with the AI tools, you know, like just because you have access, you know, like if you just use it to write the summary.

Yeah, you save five minutes or you can redesign an entire process and make quantum leaps. And I think that’s the same with DAP. So that’s why it’s good to listen to podcasts like what you’re doing to get ideas to actually try in your own company. Great. And what key factors should others consider when they’re optimizing the deployment and usage of DAP?

Oh, well, yeah, there’s always the other side of the benefits pitfalls. Well, I think the biggest one is actually when we started, we got so excited. We jumped in and helped fixing some of the problems. And then we, we had actually really kind of backtrack and like, what are the business objectives you really want to help?

You know, is it faster user adoption, higher stickiness, higher conversion rate or whatever it is, nail that down. Like, what is your goal, what you try to do, and it should be aligned to a company goal. And then everything else gets so much easier because then you have to think about how can you help in the best way, achieving that, and then you have to prioritize because there are so many opportunities you can help.

And if you have a title and a business objective, that optimization, prioritization, just gets so much easier. So that was the first pitfall for us and a learning opportunity. The second one is include stakeholders and experts because they can tell you where the problem already is. They may not know how to solve it, but.

Listen to them, include them rather than coming and then having the discussion later on. Another pitfall we run into was having clear guidance on how to build DAP solutions, you know, and maybe even more important than creating the standards is having a way to enforce them, you know, let me give you an example.

Our solution was translated into 14 languages. And that was just in English, but we know eventually we want to also create our DAP implementation into 14 languages. So the good thing was we then defined it from the start and said specifically never tie a DAP element to a label, because if the label changes from English to German.

The, the script will break. But you know, you get new people in and out and suddenly fortunately we had a QA cycle, and like, yeah, wait a second. You, you tie that to this label. Like, yeah, it was easier than creating a check query. And it’s like, well, no, you can’t do that. And so if you don’t have this system or checkpoints in place, you may run into a big problem further down the road.

So really think about. Why it is important what you do in the long term, you know, so that was definitely a big moment for us. And the last. Pitfall I can think of also be clear what you don’t want to build with DAP just because you can build it doesn’t mean you should, and you know, you, you hear the guidance from companies like WhatFix and others when there’s like, how many steps walks you should normally have.

And then suddenly we build one with like 250 steps, dozens of if-else statements. And It was really hard to QA and almost impossible to maintain. And we came to the realization, like, no, we can’t do that. We could actually, luckily we got so much information to build that we could convert them pretty easily into e-learning.

Which was more linear, and then we could at least connect from that screen directly to the LMS as we talked before. And so we could at least save the time, but be very clear where it’s just not the best solution. So these are kind of the pitfalls from our own experience and hopefully other people will avoid them.

I like the last one a lot, Thomas, because you know, when folks start using DAP as a technology, it’s very exciting, right? When you start using it. People start building a lot of stuff, right? It’s like you learn how to paint for the first time, you start painting every picture you can paint. But the job of DAP is to make life simpler at the end, not more complicated.

So I think I, I really like that point then. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Alright. Now, here’s a stat that I’m sure you know, but for our listeners, it’s projected that by the year 2025, a staggering 70 percent of the organizations will have DAP primarily driven by AI integration. 

In your experience Thomas, could you elaborate on how DAPs and AI can complement each other to create a more cohesive knowledge management ecosystem?

Yeah. Well, I really like this question because I had the same question a couple of weeks ago where I was at an event where a Gartner analyst was present, and I asked the question like, do you really think the 70% is achievable? And the answer I got was yes because of AI, you know, like I think the original.

It was just that we’ll have a 70 percent adoption rate and that was actually before the pandemic and the pandemic didn’t really help with the penetration of AI DAP rollouts. Now they, they feel pretty confident. And so what can AI and DAP do together? Well, first off, it can generate a lot of very valuable information and insights for AI.

To harness, you know, so the, the generation of data established was fantastic. You know the second thing, what DAP is really good. It can actually help getting clean data with the. The data validation points you can put in a process so you shouldn’t have all these wrong starts or this fraction of data.

So you can kind of help cleaning the data. The third one is really helping reducing shadow. Like. unapproved AIs in a company, you can actually have visibility into them. You have help with compliance. So if someone uses that, you can actually have warning messages or you can block them. You could have a guardrail that people use the application the right way.

You can, Hey, here’s the policy just that, you know, don’t put in sensitive information. So a lot of things you can do, but then. The flip side, AI can also help professionals, you know, like it can generate better texts, better summaries much faster. It generates better insights. I think we will see more of that coming forward and it can assist if you’re not really good in CSS or jQuery, you know, like generative AIs are so good in coding these days.

You know, you can just. Ask and I would say it brings you to the 90 to 95 percentile. It still helps if you have an understanding of what you’re doing, but it’s just amazing how much faster you are. And then you just, Oh yeah, that was a coma missing and now it works. And the last thing, which I’m super excited is.

I think we will see the next level of personalization, you know, like, I think AI can really help getting better insights in how much time a customer spends on a particular screen or the mouse movement. I can observe that much better and interject much more personalized. And I mean, the segmentation you already have from DAP is just fantastic.

So if you put these two things together, I think it just. We’ll see values you couldn’t imagine a couple of years ago. So, yeah, I think the 70%, I mean, it’s still a high number, but with, with all the things going on, I think two years suddenly seems so long. If you see the changes we have seen in 23, now two years of the same pace, or if that even increases, I mean, who knows where we will be in 25.

Yeah, that’s right. Then my next question, if I would have asked you just six months back, the answer would have been AI, but now it’s not. So I’ll ask you that question and let’s see what your answer is, which is as we conclude this episode, 

How do you see the role of DAP in knowledge management evolving in the future? And what do you think is on the horizon for that technology? 

Oh, yeah. I mean, as you just said correctly, a vision you had yesterday may be already a reality today, you know so we, we are living in a fast-paced world now where I see big value opportunities in 24 with AI and DAP together or.

Alone, it’s like a rollout of AI in a controlled manner with DAP. I think many companies struggle like they wanna do it, but they don’t really know how to control AI rollout. I think DAP is the solution. I, I, I haven’t seen anything better in my tinted worldview, but I, I, I really think it’s a, a super powerful combination Then.

The second thing, as we talked about a little bit, the focus on end-to-end processes across systems. I think that’s something we will see more. Is it easy? No. But now you have at least a chance to actually address things we have tried for 20 years to do in a way, Which Actually, business people can pretty much drive it.

It’s not that you need to translate everything into technical jargon and someone who has no idea about your business process tries to solve it for you. So you’re far more in the driver’s seat. And I think that always helps getting you closer to what you really want. thE third thing I would say that just in time interventions based on better analytics.

I think the learning capabilities of these AI is just Tremendous. And the speed and accuracy. And then from a poor knowledge management perspective, I think that’d be just a dream come true. You know, like you can now bring the knowledge wherever it’s needed, when it’s needed to who needs it, you know because you have all the segmentation, you have the tools to inject it into any field and We literally can do things we were talking about 20 years ago.

We just didn’t have the means to do it to that level. What your company and other companies are offering these days. So I’m really super excited seeing what’s next because the journey 23 was just a rollercoaster full of excitement. And we will see where it goes from here. If, if I were Thomas myself, a VP of product for one of the DAP companies, maybe this is my vision would be, I wake up in the morning since we spoke about ERPs, I speak into my Alexa.

What are the requisitions you know, which need my approval? It calls out, okay, go ahead and approve this. Don’t, you know, and DAP does that for me with AI. And I’m just, you know, talking the phone. Maybe, you know, we reach that stage as well one day. Yeah. Well, I don’t think we are that far. I saw a keynote in 2000 and actually reached out to the keynote speaker after 23 years.

And he’s a professor of computer science and he had a very similar vision. What you just mentioned is like a, it was more from us. It’s cool person perspective, you know, like Hey, I need to learn this topic. Can you tell me the five most important pieces? It’s like, okay. And then, you know, like he had this conversation, like, what about this?

Can you tell me more about that? What’s the difference between A and B? And then it’s like, oh, okay, that’s cool. Well, could he combine all the things we just talked about into an essay with 500 words and references and like, okay. So that was his speech in 2000. Now, in 23, you know, chat GPT launched voice, you could do exactly that.

And I had to call this guy and like, Hey, have you seen what we can do now? Now to your story, the ERP story, I think we are that close to actually do that. So, I mean, it’s just super exciting. Exciting times ahead. What an exciting discussion. Thank you, Thomas, for the insights you shared today. They are a game changer.

I’m sure the, absolutely. I’m sure our viewers agree as well. 

What are your parting words for the audience listening to this? 

I would say go out and create your compelling DAP story. You know, if you don’t have a DAP story or DAP application yet, create a story to bring it in house. If you already have one, create a good story, how to bring it to the next level and why that is so.

Essential to you and your success for, for your team, but more important, the company, how you can really contribute to the bottom line of your company. So that would be my parting word, use storytelling. Thank you.

Conclusion

Absolutely. Thomas, thanks a lot. And to our listeners, your engagement drives us keep the feedback coming on Apple Podcast, Spotify, and beyond.

This is just the beginning. The future of work is an exciting journey as you’ve got Thomas, and we are on it together. Stay tuned for more until next time. This is Arijit from the Digital Adoption Show, signing off.