Is It *Really* Digital Transformation?
“Digital Transformation” might be one of the most overused phrases in the tech world. Everyone says they’re doing it. Many have declared it’s complete. But scratch beneath the surface and you’re left wondering…is any of it actually real?
If you ask ten people what Digital Transformation means, you’ll get ten different answers, and that’s part of the problem. Is it a project? A mindset? A capability? A buzzword? No one quite agrees. And that ambiguity made it a goldmine for consultants and tech vendors alike.
The basic playbook looked like this: map the “as-is”, dream up a “to-be”, draw a neat arrow between the two, swap out some systems, re-label some teams, and call it a transformation. Simple.
Except it wasn’t.
Because once you got into the weeds, the high-level diagrams fell apart. The real problems weren’t visible until it was too late. Cue frantic pivots, descoped features, budget overruns, and “minimum viable outcomes” that weren’t viable at all. You aimed for a circle, ended up with a triangle, and called it progress.
The Great Explosion (and Implosion) of Digital Transformation
For a while, digital transformation was gospel. A survival imperative. If you weren’t doing it, you were dying.
And because nobody really knew what it entailed, a wave of false prophets emerged, armed with slides, roadmaps, and multi-year budget asks. The promise was seductive: everything will be automated, streamlined, and profitable. A brave new world where humans barely need apply.
That future never quite arrived.
We’ve seen many digital transformations attempted and we’ve seen exactly zero succeed in the way they were originally sold.
Why? Because the end goal was never clear. The scope was undefined. The metrics were vague or non-existent. And more often than not, the execution boiled down to: build a shiny new thing, then forklift the old organisation into it.
It just never worked.
Take the global airline we worked with. They were drowning in legacy. But rather than modernising piece by piece, they built an entirely new architecture and tried to transplant everything into it. It collapsed - hard. There was no clear goal. No measured success. Just an expensive, well-intentioned failure.
Tech vs. Digital: The Great Divide
Another fatal flaw: splitting the “technology team” from the new “digital” unit.
We saw this first-hand in both a major UK government department and a large financial services firm. Traditional IT - dismissed as “tin and wires” people - were told to stick to the plumbing. Meanwhile, the shiny new digital teams, led by product and marketing types, had grand visions but lacked depth in architecture, security, and operational support.
The result? Battles. Silos. Dead systems. And a digital estate that no one was able - or willing - to support.
This was also the era of new titles: Chief Digital Information Officer (CDIO) versus Chief Technology Officer (CTO). More politics. More infighting. More fragmentation. In most cases, the model broke down and quietly reverted to the old CIO structure, with a bunch of half-finished projects trailing in its wake.
What did we gain? Not much. What did it cost? A lot: money, morale, and momentum.
Let’s Stop Pretending
So let’s be honest: was any of this really “digital transformation”? Or were we just trying to automate a few spreadsheets, put a shinier UI on an old process, or avoid rewriting legacy systems we didn’t understand?
None of that is wrong. In fact, it’s often the right thing to do. But calling it Digital Transformation doesn’t make it so, and it certainly doesn’t mean you need a bloated, three-year programme to get there.
The term became marketing fluff. A trap we all walked into.
And now, just as the noise is starting to fade, along comes the next wave: AI. If you’re not doing AI, you’re already obsolete.
Sound familiar?
Time to Get Real
Here’s what actually matters:
Define the business value.
Understand the real process landscape.
Work out what actually needs to change.
Deliver it incrementally, with clear ownership, and measurable outcomes.
No more boiling oceans. No more digital theatre. No more worshipping at the altar of transformation for transformation’s sake.
It’s not that transformation is a bad idea—it’s just that we’ve been doing it badly.
The future isn’t Digital. It’s Practical.
Let’s start there.