“Steve, we’d like you to find us an ERP that does the job. We’ve been evaluating options for a few months. I’d like a second opinion.”
It is a request I still hear regularly.
My answer is never the one they expect. Because the question itself is built wrong.
The numbers we would rather not look at
In 2025, Gartner reported that 48% of digital initiatives meet or beat their objectives. BCG and McKinsey paint a similar picture: 70% of transformation programs miss their original goals. Of 850 companies BCG analyzed, only 35% delivered what they had promised at the start.
Six or seven years ago, MIT Sloan Management Review reported that only 30% of digital projects succeeded. We are making progress. But that still leaves a majority of organizations that do not land where they meant to go.
These numbers are worth pausing on. Not to raise alarms, but to ask the right question: what did the ones that succeeded do differently?
The reflex that quietly costs the most
When an organization decides to transform digitally, the first reflex is to look for one piece of software that does it all. A full ERP. A central CRM. A single platform.
It is understandable. One tool, one vendor, one invoice. It looks simple.
The problem is that software designed to do everything does not account for your reality. It arrives with its own processes, its own sequences, its own way of doing things. And your organization has to adapt to it, instead of the other way around.
Your organization was built over years, around your market, your culture, your challenges, your optimizations. What you have built has value. Generic software cannot reflect it. And when employees have to work in a way that does not match what they naturally do, adoption drops. The project fails, not because the tool was bad, but because it never belonged to them.
What AI changes in the equation
For a long time, the choice between a big, imposing piece of software and starting from scratch was often the only realistic one for an SMB.
That is no longer the case.
With the progress of artificial intelligence and platforms like Microsoft or Amazon, you can now build a digital environment that reflects what your organization has built, on solid, proven foundations. Not from zero, and not from a monolithic piece of software that decides how you work. Your organization, your methodology, your processes, your flows, translated into an ecosystem that belongs to you.
It is a paradigm shift. And many implementation firms have not folded it into their approach yet.
An ecosystem, not a single tool
The approach that works is to build an ecosystem. Not one central tool that controls everything, but a limited number of well-chosen tools that talk to each other, fitted to your methodology, your employees, your market.
Every bridge between tools is more than a technical connection. It is a point where quality data gets extracted, and that data feeds the organization’s business intelligence. Every integration adds value to the whole, instead of concentrating your dependence in a single vendor you do not really control.
And the metric that matters most in a digital rollout is not the budget held or the timeline met. It is employee adoption. When an ecosystem reflects how your organization really works, adoption climbs on its own. And you land in the good statistics.
What it looks like in the field
Back to the client hunting for an ERP.
Instead of comparing the options on their list, we started by mapping their entire workflow. Process by process, department by department, laid out as blocks in a visual diagram. That step alone created clarity in an organization that had never seen its own inner workings so clearly.
Then, instead of choosing “the best ERP,” we proposed a five-tool solution. Three were already in the organization, underused or poorly integrated. Only two were new: targeted additions that do exactly what they had been looking for in a single piece of software for months.
The result: an ecosystem that fits and performs, aligned with their business strategy, their market, and even their employees’ level of tech knowledge. The rollout is planned in phases.
No traumatic migration. No full relearning. A start from what already exists.
There is no miracle pill in digital either
In health, nobody really believes a pill replaces exercise, food and sleep. Yet we keep looking for exactly that in our organizations: one piece of software that fixes everything.
That is not how it works.
The answer is a well-mapped ecosystem, fitted to what you have built. The organizations that understood this are the ones you find in the good statistics. Not because they found the best tool on the market, but because they had the right method.
Start by mapping. Identify what you already have. Define what you want to accomplish. Then build an ecosystem that looks like 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.
