Why Many Companies Get Digital Transformation Wrong

Have you ever bought something fancy and high-tech, thinking it’d fix a big problem in your life... and then it just sat there?

Maybe it was that high-end espresso machine you thought would make you ditch store bought coffee forever. Or that fancy exercise machine staring at you from the corner of your guest room, silently judging your health choices.

Sadly, this is often what happens with many business managers trying out new tools to bring their organisation into the digital age. Too many companies invest in cutting-edge tech expecting instant miracles—only to end up overwhelmed, underwhelmed, or worse... right back where they started.

It’s not that the tools are wrong. The right tools can absolutely streamline processes, boost efficiency, slash costs, and unlock growth. But if you put powerful tools into an organization that doesn’t know what it wants, isn’t ready to change, or hasn’t mapped out its path?

Let's just say they won't get the results they hoped for. Technology is the last thing you should buy, not the first. Because if you don’t know why you're changing and what success looks like… well, no tool in the world is going to save you from expensive disappointment.

In this post, we’re going to break down the true goal of digital transformation, and unpack the critical first steps too many companies overlook. Let’s begin by answering a simple question…

What's Your Real Digital Transformation Goal?

So many companies jump into “digital transformation” because they think they have to. Their competitors are doing it. The market expects it. Their board’s asking about AI and cloud migration and hyper automation and all the other buzzwords that sound impressive in investor meetings.

Too often, organizations leap into new systems because they’re told they have to go digital. It’s a mad rush toward modernity—without the strategy to support it.

And look, those tools can be part of the journey.  The goal isn’t to “go digital.” The real goal is improvement. Competitive advantage. Customer satisfaction. Team empowerment. Revenue growth. Cost savings. Business agility.

If going digital doesn’t support one (or ideally several) of those outcomes, then it’s just digital for digital’s sake. A very expensive, very complicated exercise in rearranging your tech stack without actually improving your business.

Before taking the leap into digital transformation, you have to assess your goals first—the outcomes, the numbers, the customer experience, the bottlenecks—and then building a digital strategy that actually supports those goals.

So before we talk about what tech to choose, we need to step back and talk about how you make that choice—and what you need to know before you start Googling platforms or calling vendors.

That’s what the rest of this article is going to help you figure out.

From Digital Transformation to Commerce Transformation

Let’s make an important distinction here. We prefer the term commerce transformation because it puts the emphasis where it belongs: on commercial outcomes. Not just going digital for digital’s sake, but driving real, measurable improvement in how a business operates, grows, and serves its customers.

Commerce transformation asks:

• How will this change help us reduce costs?
• Can we open up new revenue streams?
• Will this give us a competitive edge?
• Will this improve customer experience?

If the answer is unclear, you’re going to make the wrong technology choices that may just end up being a costly and time consuming mistake. You're not transforming—you’re just rearranging your digital furniture. 

What Do You Want The Technology to Do for You?

Tech is powerful. But it won't be able to turn your business around or solve all your problems like some kind of Silicone Valley magic. Technology only becomes valuable when it’s solving a clearly defined problem. 

You wouldn’t buy a forklift just because you heard it lifts things, right? You buy it because your warehouse team is spending too much time manually moving pallets and it’s slowing down shipping. The tool only matters once the pain point is crystal clear.

Same with digital tools. CRMs, ERPs, automation platforms, AI chatbots—none of these should be adopted because they’re trendy or cutting edge. They should be implemented because they directly support the outcomes your business cares about most.

The bottom line is that only once you know what you want to achieve, can you make the right tech choices.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that choosing tech too early is one of the top five reasons digital transformation fails. When you haven’t defined your business goals, your customer journey, your internal bottlenecks, or your operational pain points, you’re just picking random tools off a digital shelf and hoping one of them solves a problem you haven’t named yet.

Instead of asking yourself: “What tech should we use?” Start by asking: “What do we need to fix, improve, or enable in the business?” Then—and only then—can you pull technology into the conversation.

Because when technology is chosen with purpose, it becomes a lever that scales your operations, simplifies your life, and delivers ROI that shows up clearly on the bottom line.

The Updated Role of IT—From “Support” to “Strategic Command”

Once upon a time, IT departments were like the mechanics of the business world—making sure everything ran without a hitch. 

In today’s digital-first economy, your IT department isn’t just tech support anymore—they’re strategic leaders. In many businesses, especially mid-sized ones growing rapidly or expanding into new markets, IT is now tasked with enabling some of the most important company goals:

• Expanding into new geographies
• Integrating new sales channels
• Supporting M&A activity
• Launching new customer platforms
• Automating workflows to reduce overhead
• Improving cybersecurity and compliance

That’s a big leap from resetting passwords and installing antivirus updates. The truth is that your IT leaders are now central to your revenue strategy.

But with great power comes great… well, risk.

If your IT team chooses a tool that doesn’t integrate with your CRM? That’s not just an inconvenience—it can cause missed sales, bad customer experiences, and chaos across multiple departments.

If they roll out a system your employees can’t use or won’t adopt? That’s not just a training issue—it’s sunk cost and stalled momentum.

It’s not about whether the tool works. It’s about whether the people using it know why it matters and how it supports their daily work.

The Important Questions to Ask Before Adopting Tech

At this point it's clear that if you’re still stuck on “Which tech should we use?”—you’re asking the wrong question. But if this is the wrong first question, what are the right ones?

Here are some guiding questions that will help you determine what you want to fix, improve, or achieve as a business by adopting new technology—and what's standing in the way preventing you from achieving these goals.

1. How Mature Is Your Company Digitally?

Not every company is ready for advanced digital transformation—which is why we start off with this all-important question.

Digital maturity is your company’s current ability to effectively use digital tools and systems across different areas of the business. It’s not just about having tech—it’s about using it in smart and efficient ways that are aligned with your overall company goals.

Mapping your maturity tells you:

• What your business is capable of today
• Where you’ll need support
• How aggressive your transformation path should be

To determine the digital maturity of your company, you have to look across your entire organization to see what technology you are already using, and where you're still stuck using manual processes that can benefit from digital transformation.

Here are the types of questions you need to ask of your different departments:

Finance

• Are your financial reports automated or manually compiled?
• Can leadership get real-time views of financial health?

Operations

• Are core processes systematized or ad hoc?
• How do teams communicate? Still emailing spreadsheets back and forth?

Sales & Marketing

• Can you track leads from first touch to conversion?
• Do your platforms actually talk to each other?

Customer Service

• Are you using tickets and CRM tools effectively?
• Is data from support feeding back into product or sales?

You might find one department is already using technology effectively to get their work done, while another is basically still running on cabinet files and spreadsheets.  That’s common. And it’s a golden opportunity—because now you know where to focus in your digital transformation efforts.

2. What Is Your Business Model and Customer Journey?

In other words, you have to be clear about how your business makes money. I’m talking about how value flows through your company—and where, exactly, you lose that value along the way.

You also need to have a clear picture of your customer journey. So before you pick a tech platform to replace your outdated systems, ask:

• Who are we selling to?
• What do our customer interactions look like?
• Where are the friction points in their journey?

Understanding your business model isn’t optional—it’s foundational to devising an effective digital transformation strategy. It helps identify where automation, data, or digital tools can remove roadblocks and enhance experience. 

Without this clarity, you’re just building tech around broken processes. This is also where most digital transformation efforts lose steam—right at the start, because no one pauses to examine the underlying business model before slapping new technology on top.

3. What Are Your Internal Processes & Structures?

What happens inside your company is just as important as your customers' perceptions of your brand from the outside. That's why you have to figure out if your internal processes and structure support the transformation you’re planning for the way your company does business.

Technology is a force multiplier—it makes everything you do bigger, faster, and more pronounced. That’s great if your processes are running like clockwork. But what if you're running in a constant state of controlled chaos? 

That's why you have to start mapping how things actually get done in your organisation. Not how you think they happen. Not how they’re supposed to happen. But what really goes down on a normal Tuesday afternoon.

Here are some of the questions you might ask to get a clear picture of your departmental and interdepartmental interactions, workflows, and collaboration points:

• Where do teams overlap?
• Are silos slowing things down?
• Do you have the skills in-house to manage new systems?

This will reveal both the opportunities for transformation—and the gaps in capability you’ll need to close with digital tools and applications.

4. What Does Your Existing IT Architecture Look Like?

When’s the last time you—or anyone on your leadership team—actually sat down to understand your full IT architecture?

It’s tempting to just bulldoze the old systems and processes your company has been relying on for years and start fresh. But will the results justify this level of disruption? But sometimes, all you need is a little digital remodelling to take your business to the next level.

After identifying your goals and weak spots, then you're ready to examine your architecture. But what exactly should you be looking for? Here’s your starter checklist:

• What systems are currently in place?
• How do these systems talk to each other?
• Where are the friction points?
• Are there systems doing the same thing?
• Which systems are vital—and which ones are replaceable?
• Can existing systems be improved or extended?
• Are there redundant tools we can remove?
• Will new platforms integrate smoothly?

Once you have a clear picture of your architecture, you will get a clearer picture of which systems to modernise, and which ones need to be rebuilt from the ground up. A surgical upgrade is often more cost-effective—and less disruptive—than a full system replacement. 

5. How Is Your Company’s Data Managed?

Your company's digital architecture is simply the tools you use to manage one of your company's most precious assets: its data. The way you collect, store, and interpret the data flowing in and out of your company is crucial to your success and survival. 

The question is: Do you trust your data? Is it of sufficient quality that you can use it to make solid decisions that propel your business towards growth and profitability? For example:

I’m not just talking about reports or dashboards. I mean:

• Is your customer data accurate?
• Can you trace a sale back to its origin?
• Do your marketing, sales, and service teams all operate from the same version of the truth?

The truth is that you can’t automate, analyze, or act on garbage data. You can’t send personalized campaigns if you’ve got three versions of the same customer in your CRM. You can’t forecast demand if your sales numbers are a week behind and full of manual overrides.

And you definitely can’t make fast, strategic decisions if your leadership team is spending Monday mornings arguing over which report is accurate.

So ask:

• Do we have accurate, centralized data?
• Is our data accessible across teams?
• Are we using analytics to inform decisions?

Clean data leads to smart decisions. Faulty data leads to misinformed decisions that could end up costing you dearly in the end.

What Happens When You Skip These Steps?

Let’s say you ignore the preliminary analysis and skip straight to the fun part of choosing and implementing shiny new technology in your day-to-day operations. Here’s what often happens:

1. You Bleed Money and Time

That “fast fix” ends up needing a total do-over 12 months later when your company outgrows it. The integration you rushed through turns into spaghetti code. Time gets wasted, and money goes out the door.

2. Your Team Can’t Use the Tech

We’ve seen companies implement product data tools… that end up supporting only 30% of the catalog. Why? No training. No adoption plan. Which means that employees stick to the old systems that they trust and they know how to operate. 

3. You Misread the Market

With so many platforms on the market, you need more than gut instinct to choose the one best suited to your company. Without knowing your business model, maturity, and goals, you’ll get lost in the noise—and likely pick the wrong solution for your needs.

4. Your Shiny New Tech is Already Obsolete

It's an unfortunate reality that tech moves at the speed of thought. Platforms rise and fall in the span of a year or two. Composable architectures and MACH strategies (microservices, APIs, cloud-native, headless) are replacing bulky, monolithic setups. But if you don't understand your needs, you'll either pick outdated tech—or get stuck switching later.

Conclusion

This article wasn’t just about showcasing the benefits of digital transformation. It was about avoiding the traps that so many well-meaning businesses fall into when they start out on their digital transformation journey.

Too splurge on technology without doing the essential strategic groundwork that makes transformation stick. And when that happens, what starts with optimism and big plans often ends in stalled projects, wasted budgets, and frustrated teams.

Here’s the thing most transformation consultants won’t tell you : Digital Transformation is the end of the journey—not the beginning.

The tech tools you choose to run your business operations are the final pieces of the transformation puzzle—not the starting line.

Effective digital transformation doesn’t start in the server room. It starts in the boardroom. In your team meetings. In the real conversations about where the business is now—and where it needs to go.

Yes, it takes effort. Yes, it takes planning. And yes, sometimes it means asking hard questions. But the end result is well worth the time and treasure.  trust me: the view from the top is worth every step.

Because the companies that win aren’t the ones who adopt tech the fastest. They’re the ones who adopt it wisely.