Redefining enterprise transformation in the age of intelligent ecosystems

As IT professionals and business decision-makers, we’ve routinely used the term “digital transformation” for well over a decade now to describe a portfolio of enterprise initiatives that somehow magically enable strategic business capabilities. Ultimately, the intent, however, is generally at odds with measurably useful outcomes. Transformation initiatives usually defy gravity in terms of what is practical and realistic for modern enterprises with legacy applications and infrastructure, yet we persist in funding them on a large scale and positioning them as value and outcome-driven  

When we consider the implications of fixed infrastructure costs and capex investments, efforts like cloud migration, enterprise data platforms, robotic process automation (RPA), and API-first initiatives presented an almost irresistible opportunity to enable and unlock business capabilities and value. What we consistently overlooked were the direct and indirect consequences of disruption to business continuity, the challenges of acquisitions and divestitures, the demands of integration and interoperability for large enterprises and, most of all, the unimpressive track record for most enterprise transformation efforts. The scorecard speaks for itself. A study by McKinsey found that less than 30% of digital transformation initiatives are successful in achieving their objectives. For large enterprises, the success rate is even lower, with estimates hovering around 16-20% due to the scale and complexity of the initiatives. 

The API-first era 

In 2012, as a software architect in a global sportswear and apparel enterprise, it became clear to me during the API-first era that transformation was no longer a matter of lofty ambitions that included monolithic service bus implementations, refactoring, reverse engineering or re-engineering in-house applications along with infrastructure modernization. Later, as an enterprise architect in consumer-packaged goods, I could no longer realistically contemplate a world where IT could execute mass application portfolio migrations from data centers to cloud and SaaS-based applications and survive the cost, risk and time-to-market implications. Our commitments to the businesses we supported as architects were perpetually at odds with reality. A tectonic shift was moving us all from monolithic architectures to self-service models and an existential crisis for architecture and IT was upon us.