We hear the buzz word, “digital transformation”, almost everywhere we go. But, what exactly does it mean? Digital transformation is the concept of integrating technology into all areas of business. This can be challenging and daunting for many organizations as they attempt to get all departments in-sync. In fact, 70% of digital transformation initiatives fall short of their intended targets. Why does this happen and can it be avoided? Let’s dive in more to find out!

Benefits of Digital Transformation

Why do organizations turn to technology? In lamest terms, it helps them become more efficient in all aspects of their business. 85% of businesses report that integrating technology into their daily operations increased their market share. This can be attributed to the data that technology allows you too accrue over the lifetime of the business, like we spoke about in our cloud computing article. Insights pulled from data allows for smarter decision making as well as decreased risk of failure, in addition to allowing an organization to learn more about their customer. Next, customer relationship management platforms like Hubspot or project management tools like Asana can fuel better collaboration and enhance the customer experience. This can also help speed to market in companies that are fueling product launches or new feature requests. As you can imagine, this can positively impact profit growth and lifetime value of your customer.

Digital Transformation is Important.. So, Why Does it Fail?

Integrating technology into your organization can be a daunting task especially in organizations that lack the resources to ensure success and do not fully understand the technology stack they need to implement their priorities to hit their company goals.

Lack of planning is a major reason why digital transformation initiatives fail. It is important to rank initiatives and evaluate if the proper resources are in place as many businesses dive into projects without understanding the real business problem at hand. In many business cases, especially those in legacy industries, some employees become resistant to change. This can lead to lack of adoption among an initiative and ultimately result in a project losing steam as it slowly reaches failure. Additionally, not having a strategy in place can lead to wrongfully estimating the capital required to succeed.

Lastly, ensuring that you are tracking the proper metrics throughout the lifecycle of the project is crucial. Transformation initiatives can simply fail due to businesses tracking the wrong metrics. This leads to failures that may have ultimately resulted in successful implementations if the right metric was being tracked. We call this the “North Star” metric as it is used as your guide for tracking the progress of your project.

Forming a Digital Transformation Strategy

Enough talk about the failures of digital transformation, lets successfully implement a digital strategy! Where do we start? It is important to understand the core problem of your business. What is the issue at hand and what does the intended experience look like for the end-user? Next, estimate the resources and capital needed for the initiative. This requires strategic thinking and if your business lacks resources to properly do this, that is okay! Companies like Codelitt can guide you from beginning to end in your planning process. In the midst of the planning process it is important to prepare your employees for the implementation. What is to be expected of them and how can you ensure proper adoption to fuel long-term success of the project at-hand? Lastly, let’s come up with the right “North Star” metric to track throughout the lifecycle of the project. This will help point us in the right direction and use data to drive us to the finish-line.


Codelitt loves helping companies with digital transformation initiatives. We understand it can be an exhausting task and our team is here to help. From discussing strategy to implementation, we’d love to work together! If you have a project or idea in mind we’d love to hear contact us here!