The phrase has the merit of being saleable. It has the defect of naming the tool instead of the problem — and of suggesting there might be some transformation other than that of the business itself.
What the phrase dodges
A business does not transform because it acquires digital tools. It acquires them because it has decided to change something: what it sells, to whom, or how it organises itself to do so.
When that decision is missing, the digital project stands in for it. A tool is installed, teams are trained, measures are tracked — and what you get is a faster version of how things already worked.
Digitising a process you have not rethought amounts to doing the same thing faster, with one more subscription.
The three questions that come before the tool
- What has to change in what we sell?
- What has to change in how we organise ourselves to deliver it?
- What will not change — and must not be degraded by any tool?
The third is the most neglected, and often the most useful. Many projects fail less for what they bring than for what they destroy without noticing: closeness to the customer, flexibility in delivery, knowledge that lived in no software.
What digital does very well
Once the decision is taken, tools become formidably effective. They make measurable what was not, remove double entry, shorten timescales, and surface the points of friction nobody could name.
That is in fact their most underrated use: revealing. The friction a tool exposes is almost always organisational friction, which existed long before it.
The order that works
Decide, then tool up. The reverse — tooling up and hoping that use will produce the decision — consumes budget and patience, and ends in an abandonment for which the tool will be blamed. What we support, then, is not a digital transformation: it is a business transformation, of which digital is one lever of execution.