Sustaining Value After Digital Transformation: How to Avoid the Post-Launch Value Erosion Trap

Digital business transformation is a journey, not a destination. For many organizations, the excitement and momentum of launching a new digital platform or capability is quickly followed by a sobering reality: the value created during transformation can erode rapidly after go-live. In fact, research shows that the highest drop in value occurs not during the build, but in the maintenance and operations phase that follows. This post-launch phase is often overlooked, yet it is critical to realizing the full return on your digital investment.

Why Value Erodes After Go-Live

Despite significant investments in digital transformation, studies indicate that 70% to 95% of businesses fail to reach their transformation objectives, with an average failure rate of 87.5%. The most significant loss of value happens after the initial release, when the transformed landscape is handed over to internal IT or third-party support teams. Several factors contribute to this:

Loss of Knowledge: When the teams that built the digital solution step away, critical tacit and tribal knowledge is often lost. This makes troubleshooting and enhancements slower and less effective.
Siloed Operations: Product, support, and business teams frequently operate in silos, leading to misalignment and slower response to issues or opportunities.
Inadequate Knowledge Transfer: Handoffs between transformation partners and internal teams often fail to capture the complexity of the new digital platform, resulting in lower adoption and increased time to resolve issues.
Lack of Continuous Improvement: Many organizations treat digital transformation as a one-time project rather than an ongoing process, missing opportunities to optimize and evolve their platforms.

The Importance of Ongoing Partnership

To prevent value erosion, organizations must rethink the post-launch phase as a critical part of the transformation journey. The key is to maintain continuity with the teams and partners who built the solution, ensuring that deep domain and technical knowledge is retained. This approach enables:

Faster Issue Resolution: When the original transformation team remains involved, issues are diagnosed and resolved more quickly, reducing downtime and improving user experience.
Proactive Performance Monitoring: Ongoing monitoring of service levels and key performance indicators (KPIs) allows for early identification of issues and continuous optimization.
Seamless Knowledge Transfer: Involving support engineers and experts during the transformation stage ensures that knowledge is embedded within the maintenance team, preventing critical information loss.
Continuous Improvement: With a trusted partner, organizations can move beyond maintenance to ongoing enhancement, leveraging new technologies and responding to evolving business needs.

Best Practices for Sustaining and Growing Value

Embed Knowledge Transfer Early: Involve support and maintenance teams from the outset of the transformation, not just at the end. This ensures a smooth transition and preserves critical system knowledge.
Break Down Silos: Foster collaboration between business, product, and IT teams. Aligning on shared goals and outcomes keeps everyone focused on delivering value.
Adopt Agile and Lean Practices: Embrace a culture of continuous improvement, using agile and lean methodologies to iterate, test, and optimize digital products and services.
Monitor and Measure: Implement robust monitoring tools to track system performance, user experience, and business KPIs. Use these insights to drive ongoing enhancements.
Invest in Change Management: Support adoption and engagement across the organization with clear communication, training, and change management initiatives.
Leverage Automation and Modern Tools: Use automation, self-healing bots, and advanced monitoring platforms to reduce manual effort, improve reliability, and free up teams to focus on innovation.

Introducing Publicis Sapient’s Application and Infrastructure Management Services (AIMS)

At Publicis Sapient, we understand that sustaining digital momentum is essential to maximizing the ROI of your transformation. Our Application and Infrastructure Management Services (AIMS) are designed to help clients maintain, optimize, and evolve their digital platforms long after launch. Here’s how we help you avoid the post-launch value erosion trap:

Prevent Knowledge Loss: Our approach involves support engineers and experts during the transformation, ensuring that the team managing your platform post-launch has deep, hands-on knowledge.
Accelerate Issue Resolution: The same experts who built your system are available to investigate and resolve issues, leading to faster mean time to resolve (MTTR) and higher system reliability.
Proactive Monitoring and Optimization: We use advanced tools, including our Sustain Engineering Platform (StEP), to provide a single pane of monitoring across your IT estate, automate cloud provisioning, and proactively monitor business processes and KPIs.
Continuous Improvement: Our teams don’t just maintain your systems—they continuously identify and implement improvements, ensuring your digital platforms evolve with your business and market needs.

The Value of Sustained Digital Momentum

Sustaining value after digital transformation is not just about keeping the lights on—it’s about building a foundation for ongoing innovation and growth. With the right partnership and approach, organizations can:

Maximize ROI: Protect and grow the value of your digital investments by preventing knowledge loss and ensuring continuous optimization.
Enhance User Experience: Deliver seamless, reliable experiences for both internal users and customers, driving satisfaction and loyalty.
Stay Ahead of Change: Respond quickly to new opportunities and challenges, leveraging your digital platforms as engines of innovation.

Take the Next Step

The journey doesn’t end at go-live. To unlock the full potential of your digital transformation, it’s essential to sustain momentum and continuously evolve. Publicis Sapient’s AIMS offering is your partner in this ongoing journey—helping you avoid the post-launch value erosion trap and realize lasting impact from your digital investments.

Ready to sustain and grow the value of your digital transformation? Let’s connect and explore how we can help you maintain digital momentum and maximize your ROI.