Is it *really* Digital Transformation?

Ah yes. That ubiquitous term that's been floating around boardrooms and included in business strategies for years now; is it a noun, a verb or something else? Everyone's doing it, has already done it, or is at least claiming to. But here's the million-dollar question: are we really doing it?

If you gather ten people in a room and ask them what digital transformation is, you'll get ten different answers and that's part of the problem. In the recent past this ambiguity created the perfect breeding ground for soothsayers and false prophets, who arrived with grand promises of digital nirvana. You're probably familiar with the story - complex, yet beautiful presentations promising that - for a substantial investment - your business would emerge from this magical process with a fully automated, entirely online operating model with profits galore.

The typical playbook started with an "as-is" picture – a huge discovery process that required teams of people just to compile. Then came the "to-be" picture – the promised land where everything just works perfectly. Legacy? No such thing in this transformed environment. The path to getting to the new world was always painted as easy; it's a simple case of swapping components in a pre-prescribed sequence over a relatively short period of time.

My question is though, is it really "digital transformation"? Re-inventing a business to move it from entirely manual processes to automated, online ones probably is. Slapping a web front-end on a legacy system probably isn't.

Like many of you, I've been in the trenches of several of these transformations, and I'll tell you something that might surprise you – not many truly succeed. Now that does of course depend on your definition of success, but the barometer I'm using is that the programme has been delivered to time and budget and has unlocked the tangible (financial) and intangible benefits that were cited as the drivers for embarking on the transformation in the first place.

Let me share a particularly memorable example: a global airline I worked with decided to tackle their legacy system problems head-on. Instead of methodically modernising process by process, they opted for the big bang approach – building an entirely new architecture and infrastructure from scratch, planning to "forklift" their people and processes over wholesale. Now that is transformative. It's ambitious. And it didn't work.

The project was de-scoped and de-scoped to the point of becoming unrecognisable from the vision it set out to achieve. One foot in the new digital world, one stuck in the legacy, a Frankenstein's monster of a delivery. No clear definition of success. No tangible metrics. No real understanding of what they were trying to achieve beyond "becoming digital."

The Great Divide

Another interesting pattern I've observed in digital transformation is the artificial separation between "technology" and "digital" teams. I've witnessed this in both a huge UK central government organisation and a financial services behemoth. Both organisations made the same critical mistake: they relegated their traditional IT teams – the "tin and wires people" – to the basement, while a new "digital" team took centre stage.

The result? A power struggle. The digital team, primarily composed of marketing-led, front-end, and mobile app developers, couldn't function without the traditional IT expertise. They lacked the crucial architecture, cloud/infrastructure expertise, and support capabilities, so when things didn't behave as expected, there weren't many busting a gut to support them.

This cultural divide was often further cemented with the creation of new C-suite positions like CDIO (Chief Digital Information Officer) alongside the traditional CTO role. Quite often teams had to choose sides, creating a schism that usually proved unsustainable. In many cases these divided structures were eventually collapsed back in under the auspices of a single CIO, but not before projects were repeatedly de-scoped until they were mere slivers of their original ambitions, leaving wasted money, burned-out people, and minimal tangible benefits.

The AI Parallel

Sound familiar? It should, because we're seeing the same pattern repeat with AI today. The messaging is remarkably similar: "Adapt or die", and we're at risk of making the same mistakes of chasing buzzwords instead of value.

So what's the solution? Instead of pursuing grandiose digital transformation programs, let's get back to basics:

1. Focus on specific business problems and processes that need improvement
2. Define clear, measurable outcomes
3. Take an incremental approach rather than attempting to boil the ocean
4. Break down artificial barriers between "digital" and "traditional" IT and (you guessed it) AI
5. Prioritise actual business value over FOMO (fear of missing out)

If you want to automate a few manual processes or modernise some spreadsheet-driven workflows, great! But you don't need to call it a digital transformation or wrap it in a massive change program. Sometimes, smaller, focused improvements deliver more value than sweeping transformation initiatives.