Think about the last time your team rolled out a new system. The cutover plan finished on time, the project deck looked strong, the sponsors signed off, and everyone felt a little relief.
Then real life arrived.
People opened the new screens, tried to follow a process they saw once in training, messaged the same two experts with the same questions, and quietly leaned on old workarounds whenever pressure increased. That space between “go live” and “this feels natural” is where digital transformation challenges usually live.
Plenty of organizations invest heavily in enterprise software, yet adoption lags behind expectations. Workflows feel confusing, support appears scattered, and leaders start to wonder why usage metrics stay flat. In many cases, the tools are fine. The real friction comes from how humans experience change during busy days. That is where in-app guidance and human-centered digital adoption start to matter.
When leadership teams list challenges digital transformation presents, conversations often revolve around budgets, integrations, and timelines. Those issues carry weight, although employees closer to the work describe different barriers to digital transformation.
Comments from users usually sound like this:
Each comment points to a gap between the system and the support around it. People want to follow the new process, yet they feel unsure at key steps, so they slow down, ask around, or improvise. Over time, those small decisions create some of the biggest barriers to digital transformation and hold back enterprise software.
Once you look at digital transformation challenges through the eyes of a user instead of the project plan, a few patterns repeat across industries and tools.
Most rollouts feature webinars, workshops, or classroom sessions. People attend, see the new workflow, practice a little, and then return to full inboxes. Real use of the system often begins days or weeks later, during a busy period with very little mental space for experimentation.
By that time, recordings feel long, slide decks feel buried, and only fragments of the session remain. When a real transaction appears, the person has a deadline, an unfamiliar form, and limited support in front of them. Digital transformation challenges move from theoretical risk to immediate frustration.
Process diagrams present neat flows; real applications present dense screens. Users encounter similar fields with different labels, options that sound vague, and steps whose impact on downstream reporting feels unclear.
Without contextual guidance software, each question demands extra effort. People slow their pace, ask colleagues for help, or take a guess they hope will succeed. Those small moments of hesitation and rework quickly become some of the biggest barriers to digital transformation, even when the underlying system has strong capabilities.
Almost every team relies on a handful of “go to” people who understand both the process and the system. These colleagues answer questions, fix stuck transactions, and carry an impressive amount of detail in their heads.
This pattern keeps operations afloat, although it also limits scale. When those experts become overloaded, change roles, or take extended leave, digital change adoption stalls. Ticket queues grow, frustration spreads, and leaders realize that the initiative never truly reached a broad base of users.
Employees juggle many changes at once: new platforms, new compliance requirements, new workflows, all layered onto existing responsibilities. Even when every initiative has a clear business case, the combined load drains energy.
When each new system arrives with dense training and little in-the-flow support, people start to protect their attention. They learn just enough to stay compliant, avoid complex scenarios, and rely on shortcuts that feel familiar. Digital transformation challenges then include process complexity and very human fatigue.
Training sessions still play a crucial role. They explain why a new platform matters, introduce key concepts, and set expectations. The decisive moments for digital change adoption, however, tend to appear later and feel much smaller.
Picture someone trying to submit a purchase order, record a quality incident, or update a customer record while juggling other tasks. A critical field appears, the person hesitates, and a quick choice follows: ask for help, pause the work, or guess. That moment decides whether digital transformation challenges shrink or grow.
In-app guidance aims directly at this point in the journey. By placing support inside the application, it reduces pressure on memory and reduces reliance on long manuals. Instead of expecting users to recall every step from a classroom, the system provides step-by-step, contextual assistance at the moment of need. That approach reflects human-centered digital adoption in practice rather than only in strategy decks.
In-app guidance adds a light, intelligent layer over the user interface. The person stays inside the application, while guidance appears on top of the live screen and reacts to context. The goal involves helping people succeed with real tasks, not just presenting generic hints.
A guide might walk through a workflow in sequence, highlight each field, explain what belongs there, and move forward only when the user continues. A targeted tip might sit beside a confusing dropdown and describe, in plain language, how each choice affects approvals or reports. A short one-time tour might appear the first time a manager visits a new dashboard, so that exploration feels safe and structured.
Because the support responds to role, screen, or scenario, in-app guidance can reduce digital transformation challenges without overwhelming users with constant prompts. People retain control, while the software quietly keeps them on track. Over time, those moments of help accumulate into smoother enterprise software adoption and fewer barriers to digital transformation.
OnScreen Guidance belongs in the family of digital adoption platforms and focuses on in-app guidance for complex enterprise systems such as ERP, CRM, HR, and finance tools. It sits on top of those applications and brings human-centered digital adoption directly into everyday workflows.
Process owners and subject matter experts use OnScreen Guidance to capture their knowledge as interactive guides, without code and without long development cycles. That approach keeps content close to the work and allows teams to adjust quickly when processes change.
Key ways OnScreen Guidance helps with digital transformation challenges:
Taken together, these capabilities help digital change adoption progress from “we launched a system” toward “people across the business feel confident using it in real work.”
Every digital initiative eventually faces a simple question: did this project change how people actually work, or did it only deliver new screens and training slides? The answer usually depends on how well users feel supported during those everyday moments when they feel uncertain in the system.
By pairing your enterprise applications with in-app guidance from OnScreen Guidance, you can reduce common digital transformation challenges, remove practical barriers to digital transformation, and create a smoother path toward real adoption. Software investments then connect more directly to productivity, data quality, and user confidence.
If your own projects sit somewhere between “live” and “fully adopted,” in-app guidance can provide the missing layer.
Book a demo of OnScreen Guidance to see how contextual in-app guidance can accelerate adoption, close the gap between rollout and daily use, and help digital initiatives deliver measurable, lasting value.