Why 70% of Digital Transformation Projects Fail (and How to Avoid It)
- Roberto Benanti
- Apr 3
- 3 min read
70% of digital transformation projects fail to meet their expected outcomes. It's a figure that has been circulating for years, cited by McKinsey, Gartner, and a range of different studies. Yet companies keep launching digital projects with the same optimistic expectations and, too often, the same mistakes.
Having worked with Italian SMEs for years, we've seen up close both the projects that work and the ones that stall. The difference, almost always, is not the technology chosen. It's three far more basic mistakes, repeated with an impressive consistency.
Mistake 1: buying the solution before understanding the problem
The pattern is always the same: management attends a demo, the software seems to solve everything, the contract is signed. Then implementation begins and you discover the product covers 80% of cases but not the 20% most critical for that specific company. Or that the real problem was organisational, not technological, and no software solves it on its own.
The most important phase of any digital transformation project is not choosing the tool. It's precisely mapping the problem: where time is lost today, where information gets lost, what the real cost of the current situation is. Only from that mapping does it become clear which solution makes sense, and in what priority order.
A manufacturing company we work with had purchased a new ERP to "solve production problems". After 18 months the ERP was live, but the production problems remained. Analysis revealed the issue was in production capacity planning, a process the ERP supported but had never been configured correctly because nobody had mapped the real process before implementation.
Mistake 2: underestimating organisational change
Every new digital tool requires people to change the way they work. This is obvious in theory. In practice, in the Italian SMEs we've seen, change management is almost always treated as a detail: a few hours of training, a user manual, and off you go.
The typical result: the new system is formally adopted but people keep working as before, often running both systems in parallel. After a few months the old "temporary" system is still there, the new one is only partially used, and data is split across both.
Digital transformation projects that work treat organisational change with the same seriousness as technology. They involve the team from the start, explain the why before the how, and define an adoption plan with verifiable milestones.
Mistake 3: trying to do everything at once
"We want to digitise operations, CRM, document management and internal communication. All by end of year." Every time we hear this, we know the project is already at risk.
The successful digital transformations among the SMEs we've guided almost always share one characteristic: they start with a precise problem, solve it well, measure the results, and only then expand to the next area. Ambition isn't a flaw, but sequence matters.
A project that delivers a measurable result in 60 days creates the organisational momentum for the next step. A project that runs for 18 months without tangible intermediate results loses internal support along the way and stalls.
What distinguishes the projects that work
Looking back at the digital transformation projects that delivered concrete results, we always find three elements in common: a well-defined problem before any tool is chosen, an adoption plan that includes people and not just technology, and an incremental approach with measurable results at each stage.
It's not a magic formula. But it's an effective antidote to the three mistakes described above. And it applies regardless of sector, company size, or the tool chosen.
Are you evaluating a digital transformation project?
At SBK Solutions we support SMEs in the most critical phase: the one before choosing the tool. We help map the real problem, define priorities, and build an adoption plan that works for people as well as processes.
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