People don't wake up wanting to use Excel. They use Excel because it helps them finish their job.
If your IWMS, ERP, lease system, or AI tool makes their work easier, they'll use it. If it doesn't, they'll build a workaround. A spreadsheet. A side tracker. A file they email instead of upload.
And then leadership calls it an adoption problem. It isn't. It's a product problem.
The Workaround Is Evidence, Not the Problem
People don't abandon tools out of laziness. They abandon tools that slow them down. If an analyst can answer a question in Excel in ten minutes and it takes two hours in the system, the spreadsheet wins. Every time. That's not defiance. That's judgment.
The workaround is not the problem. The workaround is evidence. Every spreadsheet is telling you something your technology stack isn't. The spreadsheets scattered across your organization are the most honest product review you will ever receive. Each one marks a place where the system failed and someone quietly solved the problem themselves.
This connects directly to a pattern we see across corporate real estate: teams don't use spreadsheets because they lack systems. They use them because the systems don't serve the way they actually work.
Why Adoption Metrics Miss the Point
Most organizations respond to low adoption with more training, stricter mandates, and adoption dashboards. Almost none ask the only question that matters: why is the workaround better?
Measuring adoption tells you that people aren't using the system. It does not tell you why. And without the why, every intervention is a guess. More training assumes the problem is knowledge. Stricter mandates assume the problem is compliance. But if the real problem is that the system is genuinely slower or less reliable than the workaround, none of those interventions will work. They will just make people better at hiding their spreadsheets.
The organizations that solve adoption do not force usage. They understand why the workaround exists and either fix the system or replace it with something that actually serves the work.
What This Means for Your TRIRIGA Transition
As TRIRIGA support ends and IBM moves customers toward Maximo, many organizations are focused on selecting the next platform. Which vendor. Which features. Which migration path.
Before you select anything, spend time understanding why people created workarounds around your current system in the first place. Every spreadsheet that grew up around TRIRIGA is a requirement that the platform did not meet. If you select a new system without understanding those requirements, you will simply recreate the workarounds on a new platform. Same problem, new logo, another several hundred thousand dollars.
This is exactly why a CRE technology assessment should start with how people actually work, not with a feature comparison. The workarounds are your requirements document, already written, scattered across your organization in the form of spreadsheets nobody officially sanctioned.
If you are navigating a TRIRIGA transition, the workarounds are the most valuable input you have. Do not ignore them in the rush to pick a replacement.
The Same Logic Applies to AI
The current wave of AI adoption in corporate real estate will follow exactly the same pattern. If AI genuinely helps people make better decisions or complete work faster, adoption will happen naturally. Nobody needs to be forced to use a tool that saves them two hours a day.
If it doesn't, measuring usage won't change the outcome. An AI tool that produces answers people don't trust, or that takes longer to verify than to do the work manually, will be abandoned just like every other system that failed to serve the work. The spreadsheet will win again.
This is why the best CRE analytics software is measured by whether people choose to use it, not by whether they are required to. Adoption is not something you enforce. It is something you earn by being better than the workaround.
Stop Measuring Adoption. Start Earning It.
Technology succeeds when it fits the business, not when the business bends to the technology. Every mandate, every training session, every adoption dashboard is an attempt to make people bend. And people, rationally, resist bending when the tool they were given is worse than the one they built themselves.
Stop measuring system adoption. Start measuring whether the system deserves adoption.
Your employees are not loyal to your software. They are loyal to getting their work done. Give them a tool that helps them do that, and the adoption problem disappears on its own.
If you are selecting a new CRE platform or trying to understand why your current one isn't being used, learn about our assessment approach or book a 20-minute call to talk through your situation.