“Steve, we’d like you to find us an ERP system that does the job. We’ve been evaluating options for a few months now. I’d like to get a second opinion.”
It’s a request I hear all the time. And just recently, too.
My answer is never what they expect. Because the question itself is poorly phrased.
The numbers we’d rather not look at
Gartner reported in 2025 that 48% of digital initiatives meet or exceed their goals. BCG and McKinsey paint a similar picture: 70% of transformation programs fail to achieve their initial goals. Of the 850 companies analyzed by BCG, only 35% deliver on their initial promises.
Six or seven years ago, the MIT Sloan Management Review reported that only 30% of digital projects were successful. We’ve made progress. But the majority of organizations still fail to achieve their goals.
These figures are worth taking a closer look at. Not to cause alarm, but to ask the right question: what did those who succeeded do differently?
The costly reflex
When an organization decides to undergo a digital transformation, its first instinct is to look for software that does it all: a comprehensive ERP system, a centralized CRM, or a single platform.
That makes sense. One tool, one provider, one invoice. It sounds simple.
The problem is that software designed to do everything doesn’t take your reality into account. It comes with its own processes, its own workflows, and its own ways of doing things. And your organization has to adapt to it, rather than the other way around.
Your organization has been built up over the years, tailored to your market, your culture, your challenges, and your optimizations. What you’ve built has value. Generic software cannot reflect that. And when employees have to work in a way that doesn’t align with how they naturally operate, adoption rates plummet. And the project fails—not because the tool was bad, but because it didn’t feel like their own.
How AI Changes the Equation
For a long time, choosing between a large, complex software package and starting from scratch was often the only realistic option for a small or medium-sized business.
That is no longer the case.
With advances in artificial intelligence and platforms like Microsoft and Amazon, you can now build a digital environment that reflects what your organization has built, based on solid, proven foundations. Not from scratch, and not with monolithic software that dictates how you work. Your organization, your methodology, your processes, and your workflows—all translated into an ecosystem that’s uniquely yours.
This is a paradigm shift. And many firms in the industry have not yet incorporated it into their approach.
The ecosystem rather than the tool
The approach that works is to build an ecosystem. Not a single central tool that controls everything, but a limited number of well-chosen tools that communicate effectively with one another and are tailored to your methodology, your employees, and your market.
Every integration between tools is more than just a technical connection. It’s a source of high-quality data that fuels the organization’s business intelligence. Each integration adds value to the whole, rather than concentrating dependence on a single vendor over which you have little control.
And the most important metric in a digital implementation isn’t whether you stay within budget or meet your timeline. It’s employee adoption rates. When an ecosystem reflects how your organization really works, those rates naturally rise. And you start seeing positive results.
How it plays out in practice
Back to the client who was looking for an ERP system.
Rather than comparing the options on their list, we started by mapping out their entire workflow. Process by process, department by department, presented in blocks on a visual diagram. This step alone brought clarity to an organization that had never seen its own operations so clearly before.
Next, instead of choosing “the best ERP,” we proposed a solution consisting of five tools. Three were already in use within the organization, but were underutilized or poorly integrated. We added just two targeted tools that do exactly what they had been looking for in a single software solution for months.
The result: a tailored, high-performance ecosystem aligned with their business strategy, their market, and even their employees’ level of technical expertise. The implementation will take place this summer.
No stressful transition. No need to start from scratch. Building on what already exists.
There’s no such thing as a magic bullet in the digital world either
When it comes to health, no one really believes that a pill can replace exercise, diet, and sleep. Yet we’re still looking for the same thing for our organizations: software that solves everything.
That's not how it works.
The solution is a well-mapped ecosystem tailored to what you’ve built. The organizations that have understood this are the ones that show up in the positive statistics. Not because they found the best tool on the market, but because they used the right approach.
Start by mapping things out. Identify what you already have. Define what you want to achieve. And build an ecosystem that suits you.
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Sources: Gartner, Digital Transformation Survey 2025. BCG, Flipping the Odds of Digital Transformation Success, 2024 (analysis of 850 companies). McKinsey Global Institute, The State of Digital Transformations, 2024. MIT Sloan Management Review, report on the success rate of digital projects, 2018–2019. CIO.com, “Bad CIOs Are Good for the Business,” March 2026.
