I had a dubious flirtation with Enterprise Architecture a while back—in another life—as a corporate IT employee and technology consultant.

I believe now with the benefit of hindsight, that I learned more about how office politics works than about how to design enterprise IT services.

One thing I did spend a lot of time on was Digital Transformation and Change Management.

We drew a lot of diagrams and proposed a lot of point solutions; but we never quite got to the 'future state diagram' on which we could sell the whole idea.

My recommended transformation these days after having been in business a while, would be better described as a 'business culture evolution' from static, top-down process-control-based thinking to more elastic, adaptable mindsets.

What the hell does that mean?

Just running a project to digitise the same old business processes and then centrally manage changes isn't worth the effort and may create more hassles. If you want to 10x the effect you can have, you need to create and provide the digital tools that empower your people to iterate on their own processes.

My belief now is that the best way to transform and evolve using digital tools is first to devolve the decision-making and authority to change business processes down to the lowest appropriate levels of responsibility for that process, i.e., the coal-face—and to provide those folks with the tools they need to modify, test and improve their business processes as their work environment changes.

It's a tough ask for the managerialist culture of most organisational c-suites, as loss of control is scary and confronting, but I believe that transformation is the real one that needs to be made instead of IT-led projects that just polish the surface.