[ STRATEGY ]
Digital transformation is not a buzzword
Digital transformation is a very large market with a poor success rate. Both halves of that sentence matter.
The numbers are easy to find and hard to ignore: a market valued around $880 billion today, forecast at $3.4 trillion by 2026, and Fortune Business Insights projecting $8.92 trillion by 2030. Seventy-four per cent of organisations call it a top priority. The number that gets quoted less often is that only about 35% of these initiatives succeed.
What it actually means
Stripped of the conference language, digital transformation is restructuring how an organisation works around what technology now makes possible. The textbook example is moving off paper — but the point was never the paper. It is that a process built around a filing cabinet keeps the shape of a filing cabinet long after the cabinet is gone.
What it buys you
Efficiency, first: automation takes the manual work, and the people who were doing it move to work that needed a person.
Agility, second: an organisation that can change a process in a week responds to a market move that an organisation on a quarterly cycle can only watch.
Customer experience, third: CRM and the data behind it make service personal at a scale that personal attention cannot reach on its own.
And value to everyone with a stake in it — better tools for employees, better products for customers, better margins for the people who funded it.
Why two thirds of it fails
Because the technology is the easy part and it is where the budget goes. A transformation that buys tools without changing the process underneath produces the old process with a licence fee attached.
The programmes that work treat it as an operating change that happens to need software, and they are led by someone who owns the outcome rather than the delivery.
Originally published
This first appeared on LinkedIn in March 2024: linkedin.com/in/amar-beka-2771ab1b3