What is digital transformation, in plain terms?

Because it has been attached to a great many programs that produced a new logo on a login screen and no change in how anything ran. When the deliverable is a platform rather than a changed process, the old process survives inside the new tool and the cost is permanent.

We use the term because clients use it. What we hold to is that the plan has to name processes and owners, not platforms.

The current process as it actually runs, including the parts that are undocumented. The target process, described as behavior rather than as a system. The sequence, because doing this all at once is how a company stops serving customers for a quarter. And the measure for each step, agreed before it starts.

Sequencing is where most of the judgment sits. The right first move is usually the one that makes the next three easier, which is rarely the one with the most visible benefit.

At the handover from strategy to build. A roadmap written by people who will not build it tends to describe an end state without a route, and the team that inherits it discovers in week three that two of the steps cannot be done in that order.

That gap is the reason we do both. The people who wrote the plan are the people who write the code, so when reality contradicts the plan the plan changes that week rather than at the next steering meeting.