Sustaining Digital Transformation Value: How KnowHOW Supports Post-Implementation Success

Digital transformation is not a one-time event—it’s a continuous journey. While the initial rollout of new platforms, processes, and ways of working can deliver a surge of value, many organizations struggle to sustain and grow that value over time. In fact, studies show that the highest drop in value often occurs after the initial release, during the maintenance and operations phase. This is where the real challenge begins: how do you ensure that your digital transformation continues to deliver on its promise, long after the launch?

The Post-Implementation Challenge: Why Value Erodes

Despite significant investments in digital transformation, up to 95% of businesses fail to reach their objectives, with an average failure rate of 87.5%. The most significant erosion of value happens after go-live, when the focus shifts from building to running and optimizing. Several factors contribute to this:

Loss of alignment between business, product, and support teams, leading to siloed operations.
Knowledge gaps as critical insights and context from the transformation phase are lost during handover to IT or third-party support teams.
Lack of continuous measurement, making it difficult to spot issues or opportunities for improvement before they impact performance.

These pitfalls can result in lower adoption, slower issue resolution, and missed opportunities to enhance customer and business value.

The Importance of Continuous KPI Tracking

To combat value erosion, organizations must move beyond episodic project thinking and embrace a product mindset—one that prioritizes outcomes over outputs and sees value delivery as an ongoing process. Central to this approach is the continuous tracking of key performance indicators (KPIs) across the entire digital landscape.

Continuous KPI tracking enables organizations to:

Monitor system health and performance in real time, ensuring that platforms and applications are delivering as expected.
Identify achievement gaps and areas for improvement, empowering teams to take proactive action.
Align teams around shared goals and metrics, breaking down silos and fostering a culture of collaboration and accountability.

KnowHOW: The Engine for Sustained Value

KnowHOW is Publicis Sapient’s open-source measurement framework designed to address these exact challenges. It provides an intuitive, visual dashboard that consolidates KPIs from across the organization’s transformation programs—spanning product management, design, technical quality, agile project management, and team operations.

By serving as a single source of truth, KnowHOW empowers everyone from engineers to executives with real-time visibility into program health. Its flexible architecture allows it to scale across multiple teams and business units, supporting benchmarking, gamification, and continuous improvement at every level.

Key benefits of KnowHOW include:

Consolidated, visualized data for rapid insight and decision-making.
Scalable architecture that supports large, complex organizations.
Alignment of teams to overarching business value, not just project milestones.
Open-source flexibility, enabling organizations to evolve the tool to meet their unique needs.

Integrating KnowHOW with Application and Infrastructure Management Services (AIMS)

The true power of KnowHOW is unlocked when it is integrated with robust Application and Infrastructure Management Services (AIMS). This combination ensures that the same teams who built the digital solutions remain involved in their ongoing support and optimization, preventing the loss of critical knowledge and context.

With KnowHOW and AIMS working together, organizations can:

Prevent knowledge loss by involving support engineers early and maintaining continuity post-implementation.
Resolve issues faster, as the teams with the deepest understanding of the systems are responsible for troubleshooting and improvement.
Proactively monitor SLAs and KPIs, identifying and addressing performance issues before they impact users.
Leverage automation and self-healing tools to reduce manual effort and accelerate response times.
Continuously identify and implement improvements, ensuring that digital platforms evolve in line with business needs.

A Continuous Loop of Value Creation

Sustaining digital transformation value is about creating a virtuous cycle: measure, learn, improve, and repeat. KnowHOW enables this by making work visible and measurable, democratizing access to key metrics, and embedding a culture of data-driven decision-making. When paired with AIMS, it ensures that digital momentum is not only maintained but accelerated, delivering ongoing ROI and operational excellence.

In a world where change is constant and customer expectations are always evolving, the organizations that thrive are those that treat digital transformation as a living, breathing capability. With KnowHOW and AIMS, you can ensure that your transformation delivers value—not just at launch, but every day thereafter.

Ready to sustain and grow the value of your digital transformation? Let’s start the conversation.