We’ve been hearing this a lot in the past weeks, and to be honest, at first we didn’t quite get what the similarity was supposed to be. Yes, we both refer to our work as “mining,” arduously delving for something valuable and hard to find. But Celonis is the coolest firm in process analysis, an enterprise systems giant, and we focus on human behavior and technology adoption. We didn’t quite see it at first.
But the more we think about it, the more spot on it feels:
Celonis is pioneering process mining, the ability to automatically X-ray processes and find inefficiencies that are obstacles to productivity.
We’re pioneering behavior mining: the ability to automatically X-ray team behaviors and find inefficiencies in technology adoption that are obstacles to productivity.
Bad technology uptake is a massive issue, both for those who buy it and those who create it. The world is slowly becoming aware that “deployed” doesn’t mean “in use.”
For technology buyers, an unused technology is not only a wasted investment, but also an unrealized gain in performance. Not only have they lost money on it, they also wasted a chance to better their business.
For technology creators, non-adoption is even worse. It indicates that their concepts and ideas don’t play out in the real world as they did in the lab. And when software customers only use a fraction of the features and licenses they’re paying for, it’s only a matter of time until they start cancelling them.
The reason for non-adoption is rarely the technology itself. Nowadays, technology mostly does what it says, and if it doesn’t, a fix doesn’t take long. The core reason for non-adoption is, instead, human behavior. To someone who has mastered a set of tools to solve a set of tasks, any change means giving up this mastery. We specialize in predicting how this affects technology uptake, and point out how to manage it. Based on peer reviewed science, objective observations and some fancy mathematics.
And in this, we are indeed kind of like Celonis. We strive to provide a nuanced picture of how an organization is actually running - not process-wise, but behavior-wise. We point out bottlenecks and inefficiencies, revealing whether a technology will match the capabilities and routines of your teams, and what can be done to speed up or simplify technology uptake.
So yes, we are “like Celonis, only for people.” But also for technology adoption.