Credit: Dion Eusepi As IT professionals and business decision-makers, we’ve routinely used the term “digital transformation” for well over a decade now to describe a portfolio of enterprise initiatives that somehow magically enable strategic business capabilities. Ultimately, the intent, however, is generally at odds with measurably useful outcomes. Transformation initiatives usually defy gravity in terms of what is practical and realistic for modern enterprises with legacy applications and infrastructure, yet we persist in funding them on a large scale and positioning them as value and outcome-driven When we consider the implications of fixed infrastructure costs and capex investments, efforts like cloud migration, enterprise data platforms, robotic process automation (RPA), and API-first initiatives presented an almost irresistible opportunity to enable and unlock business capabilities and value. What we consistently overlooked were the direct and indirect consequences of disruption to business continuity, the challenges of acquisitions and divestitures, the demands of integration and interoperability for large enterprises and, most of all, the unimpressive track record for most enterprise transformation efforts. The scorecard speaks for itself. A study by McKinsey found that less than 30% of digital transformation initiatives are successful in achieving their objectives. For large enterprises, the success rate is […]
