Why do technology investments fall short?

Change management as ‘a training and communications exercise’

Eagle Hill said organizations reporting stronger returns start with the work rather than the technology, measure changed behaviour rather than usage alone, and manage adoption as an ongoing discipline instead of a one-time project.

“Many organizations treat technology change management as a training and communications exercise,” Jezior said. “The organizations that realize the greatest return on technology investments take a different approach.”

Mike Hughes, group service director and an executive board member at Scotland-based Peak Scientific, outlined a similar approach in a column published Sept. 29, 2026, by TCI Media, the publisher of HPCwire. Hughes wrote that his team classified its artificial intelligence (AI) program as a change management initiative rather than an information technology (IT) deployment before requesting a budget.

“When we built our AI initiative, we treated the technology selection as the last decision, not the first,” Hughes wrote.

IT rollout versus change initiative

Hughes wrote that the two models measure success differently. “An IT rollout is done when the software is live and stable. A change initiative is done when behavior has actually shifted, when the workforce has adopted a new way of working and kept using it after the initial excitement fades,” he wrote.