Why so many digital transformation efforts stall and what we’ve learned from helping leaders get it right
We all know the numbers digital transformation is on every boardroom agenda, yet fewer than 30% of those initiatives deliver sustainable ROI.
From financial services and healthcare to manufacturing and logistics, I’ve worked with teams who started strong but quickly hit walls: bloated roadmaps, confused priorities, and cultures still stuck in legacy thinking.
That’s why I’ve come to believe this: transformation succeeds when we focus on outcomes over activity, leadership over technology, and value over vanity. Here's how I guide my clients and what you might find helpful if you're on a similar journey.
One of the most common missteps I see? Starting with tech for tech’s sake.
“Digital transformation should never be a tech refresh masquerading as strategy.”
Instead, successful transformations begin with bold, business-led goals: expanding into new markets, reducing time-to-market, improving CX, or unlocking productivity at scale. Technology simply becomes the enabler.
What we’ve seen work:
Here’s something I’ve learned the hard way: you can’t delegate transformation. It must be led.
I’ve seen the most success where leadership teams didn’t just approve the roadmap they owned it. They brought digital into the core of business strategy, upskilled themselves, and restructured how decisions were made.
"Digital is no longer the CIO’s side hustle; it’s the CEO’s core agenda."
What high-performing companies do:
Quick story: A manufacturing client of mine increased speed of adoption dramatically once they included factory leads and finance in transformation steering, not just IT.
You can’t build AI on spaghetti code. And I’ve seen too many orgs try.
If your systems don’t talk to each other, if your data is siloed, if your architecture can’t support experimentation, you’ll end up burning cash on pilots that never scale.
Here’s where we start:
Real lesson: A major insurer we worked with wanted to automate claims but had to consolidate 17 systems into a unified data lake first. Only then did their AI investments deliver value.
You can’t transform a business if you don’t transform how people think, behave, and work.
McKinsey data shows companies with cultural alignment to transformation goals are 3x more likely to succeed. I’ve seen this firsthand. Culture eats strategy, every time.
Levers that shift mindset:
“Transformation fatigue is real but so is the energy that comes when teams feel they’re shaping the future.”
Shiny new platforms don’t drive change; purposeful use cases do.
We advise clients to place smart bets where digital materially shifts outcomes:
What sets winners apart? They scale what works, link use cases to P&L impact, and embed security/compliance from day one, not later.
Transformation without measurement is theatre.
Too many teams still rely on system uptime and deployment milestones. Instead, we help clients track:
Pro tip: Create a Value Realization Office (VRO) that owns these KPIs and keeps leadership focused on outcomes, not activity.
The most innovative digital leaders aren’t building alone they’re co-creating.
Whether it’s partnerships with startups, hyperscalers, or academia, the best outcomes emerge when we build digital ecosystems that extend beyond the enterprise.
“Digital value compounds when we break silos inside and outside our walls.”
Examples I’ve seen up close:
Digital transformation isn’t about doing more tech, it’s about doing smarter, faster, more human business.
We’ve helped leaders who succeeded by:
If you're driving change in your organization, I’d love to connect. Let’s talk about how we can turn transformation into traction.
If you're rethinking your digital roadmap or wondering how to turn transformation into traction we can help.
Connect with ACI Infotech’s Digital Transformation Advisory.
Let’s build a blueprint that’s engineered for value.