If I had to name the single biggest cause of failed digital transformations, it's this: someone decided to replace a core system. The billing platform. The CRM. The product catalog. The provisioning engine. Pick your legacy system, the story is always the same.
The project gets approved with ambitious timelines. Two years in, it's running eighteen months late. Three years in, it's been "rescoped." Five years in, it's quietly shelved, having consumed tens of millions with nothing to show for it.
And for what? The replacement rarely delivers anything revolutionary. It's the same capability with a new vendor name, a new version number, and a new interface that nobody asked for. The old system worked. It was ugly and rigid, but it processed millions of transactions reliably. The new one promises flexibility it will never fully deliver, because the real complexity isn't in the technology, it's in the decades of business rules encoded into the old system.
Meanwhile, the digital initiatives that were supposed to depend on the new system never launched. Years of competitive advantage, lost.
But there's a better way.