The phrase “digital transformation” has been overused into meaninglessness.
It came out of the 2010s, when “going digital” actually meant something. Most businesses had paper-and-spreadsheet processes that needed replacing with software. There was a real transformation to do.
A decade and a half later, the businesses that needed that work have done it. Mostly. The phrase persists, attached to consultancy decks, corporate strategy documents and quite a lot of LinkedIn profiles.
Underneath the phrase, two things still matter.
The first is the work of moving things from manual to automated where the maths makes sense. The accounts team that still emails spreadsheets. The customer service team that copies data between three systems. The sales team that types CRM notes after every call. There is real cost in this work and real value in fixing it. It just does not need a “digital transformation” framing. It needs a “what processes are eating our team’s time” framing.
The second is the cultural part. Teams that grew up in a non-digital culture defaulting to in-person, to documents, to meetings. The transition to a culture where the default is asynchronous, where decisions are documented in shared tools, where most communication is text. This is harder than the technical work. It takes years and it is mostly about leadership behaviour, not tools.
Both of these are useful. Neither is “digital transformation” in the consultancy sense. They are operational improvements with a cultural component.
If you are about to commission a “digital transformation” engagement, ask yourself two questions. What specific thing will be different in 12 months? Who will own it after the consultants leave? If you cannot answer both, the engagement is mostly going to produce a deck.
If you have a real version of this work to do, let’s talk about it without the buzzword.