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Nobody needs a digital transformation

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In forty years of working in and around technology, I have never met an organisation that needed a digital transformation. I have met hundreds that were sold one.

The two are not the same thing, and the difference is worth a lot of money.

A budget wearing a plan's clothes

Listen to how the phrase is used. Nobody ever says "our digital transformation will move invoice approval from nine days to two". They say "we are embarking on a digital transformation journey". The vagueness is the feature. A specific project can be priced, scoped and judged. A transformation can only be funded.

That is why vendors and large consultancies adore the word. It converts a leadership team's general anxiety about falling behind into a general willingness to spend, without the inconvenient step where anyone defines the problem. You are not buying a fix; you are buying reassurance, at programme rates, on a multi-year term.

I have watched this same wave arrive under different names. It was e-business at the end of the nineties. Then it was digitisation, then transformation, and the same deck is now being reprinted with AI on the cover. The technology changes. The sales motion never does: name a revolution, imply the reader is late for it, price the catch-up.

What failure quietly looks like

Transformation programmes rarely fail loudly. They fail by shrinking. The scope narrows, the milestones slide, the original sponsors move on, and eventually something ships that nobody can quite connect to the money spent. Then the organisation, sensibly, never speaks of it again. Ask around your own industry. Everyone has one of these; almost nobody has a transformation they can point to that did what the business case said.

The reason is structural, not incompetence. A programme framed as "transform everything" has no natural order, so the sequencing gets decided by politics. It has no single owner, so it has many. And because the goal was never specific, nobody can say when it is finished, which means it is finished when the money is.

What organisations actually need

Specific problems, fixed in a sensible order. That is the whole alternative, and I concede it makes a terrible conference slide.

The organisations I have seen change most were never "transforming" anything. A law firm that needed one big website project run properly: understand, brief, then buy. A community foundation that needed a fund management process mapped before any system was chosen. A charity that needed to stop paying for reports and start acting on data. Each fixed the thing in front of it, learned from the fix and moved to the next. Two years later the cumulative change was bigger than any programme would have promised, and every step along the way paid for itself or was stopped.

That is the discipline: each step justified on its own, each one reversible or cheap enough to abandon, none of them dependent on a grand vision surviving three budget cycles.

The test

If someone proposes a transformation to you, ask them one question. What, specifically, will be different for a customer or a colleague in six months, and how will we know?

A good advisor answers with something small and concrete, which means you did not need the word transformation in the first place. A seller answers with a roadmap. Roadmaps are what you get when nobody wants to commit to a destination.

You do not need transforming. You need the three or four things that are actually broken fixed in the right order, by people who can name them. If someone offers you that, keep them. It is rarer than it should be.

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