Half of senior leaders say recent tech spending missed goals, finds study, putting spotlight on importance of change management
More than half of senior business leaders say their organizations' recent technology investments failed to fully achieve their intended outcomes, according to a survey released by Eagle Hill Consulting.
The consultancy found 51% of respondents reported the shortfall.
Why? The most commonly cited reason was underestimating the impact of new technology on day-to-day work.
Ipsos conducted the survey from March 3 to 9, 2026. It polled 200 senior business decision-makers in the United States at the director level or above, all working for organizations with annual revenue of US$100 million or more.
Day-to-day work impacts
Only 35% of respondents said their organization considered day-to-day work impacts before rolling out new technology, according to Eagle Hill. Roughly one-third cited continued use of legacy processes and workarounds as a primary reason their investments did not deliver expected value.
In an accompanying report, Eagle Hill said value is often lost after a system goes live, when employees keep using old processes or work around new tools. The report described a client that deployed a new enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and completed user training, but whose teams continued running legacy processes alongside it.
"Organizations often think the finish line is go-live, but that's really where the hard work begins," said Melissa Jezior, president and CEO of Eagle Hill Consulting. "Technology alone doesn't create value. People using it differently do."
The findings follow IBM research on Canadian organizations scaling AI faster than their workforce readiness.
Change management for tech
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, on 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 in HPCwire 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 behaviour has actually shifted, when the workforce has adopted a new way of working and kept using it after the initial excitement fades," he wrote.
His team used the ADKAR model – awareness, desire, knowledge, ability and reinforcement – and began applying it before the investment was approved. Hughes wrote that reinforcement is the stage most programs underfund.
He also separated return on investment (ROI) from what he called return on employee (ROE), measured through employee net promoter score (eNPS), attrition, time-to-competency and burnout reduction. Workforce readiness remains a concern in Canada, where TD research found one in three Canadian workers fake their AI abilities. HRD Canada has previously reported on three ways HR managers can increase returns on technology investments.
Hughes posed one question for organizations before any AI project reaches a vendor shortlist: "can your organization state, in specific and measurable terms, what success looks like for the frontline employee who has to use this system?"
