What is digital transformation?
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What is digital transformation?
Matt Saunders
12 May 2025
11 min read
Matt Saunders
12 May 2025
11 min read
Digital transformation 101
Digital transformation 101
What is it and how do you do it?
Everyone's doing it, but differently.
What are the benefits?
An enterprise-wide approach
Five digital transformation practices
Digital transformation is never 'done'
How we can help you
Digital transformation is an ongoing process of using technology to improve business operations and customer experiences. This blog explains its benefits and outlines what's essential for success.
Digital transformation is a term that gets thrown around a lot. But what do we mean by it? Here, we break down what digital transformation really means, the potential benefits for your organisation of embarking on a digital transformation journey, and five key practices that should be at the centre of your approach.
What is digital transformation, and how do you do it?
A business's digital transformation is a strategic initiative—a fundamental overhaul of how an organisation operates. Real digital transformation is achieved by embedding technology across all areas to improve processes and enable innovation, leading to improved customer experience and lowered costs. This involves evaluating and modernising your processes, operations, and technology to drive fast and continual customer-focused innovation.
Digital transformation at its best leaves scope for continuous improvement, leaving an organisation able to adapt to changing conditions. It's not a 'one and done', it's a long-term effort that requires constantly evolving tactics with technology increasingly integrated into the business. AI is an excellent example of this, as something that has gained a more significant foothold in recent years and is now becoming a part of most organisations' digital transformations.
Everyone's doing it, but differently.
According to McKinsey, 90% of all organisations are currently undergoing some kind of digital transformation. Every organisation's journey will be unique, and different factors might have led it to it. It might begin with a single technology project, start as a comprehensive business-wide initiative, or even be the result of a merger or acquisition. It might involve integrating digital technology into your existing processes or reinventing those processes altogether.
In every case, digital transformation is an opportunity to reimagine the way work is delivered and requires a mindset shift from traditional thinking towards a more collaborative, experimental approach.
What are the benefits?
Once you embark on your digital transformation journey, you can expect to start unlocking several benefits, including:
- Faster agility, innovation and experimentation: innovation is encouraged by reducing the cost of experimentation. This happens by automating manual processes, streamlining existing workflows, and enabling faster decision-making with real-time data and analytics. Digital tools and cloud platforms enhance team collaboration and allow your organisation to respond quickly to changing demands and market conditions.
- Increased resilience and lower costs: With a multi-cloud infrastructure, you'll have access to the latest tools and updates, making it easier to continuously improve your products and processes in functionality and reliability. With agile and DevOps practices, your developers can integrate new tech into your apps as they emerge, potentially opening up new revenue streams.
- Improved customer satisfaction: Faster iterations for products and services unlock higher customer engagement. With a tight and efficient development lifecycle, customers' needs can be tested and improved on an ongoing basis through empathetic customer support and personalised content. You'll see improved customer satisfaction and retention.
- Higher levels of team member engagement: With access to the latest tools and an agile culture, your people will feel empowered to experiment and keep learning. With higher levels of engagement comes increased productivity and profitability for your business.
- Stronger and safer software: By moving away from legacy and on-premise Infrastructure tools and adopting the latest security technologies, you can detect and respond to threats, reduce the number of successful attacks, and minimise cybersecurity threats and the impact of any damage.
An enterprise-wide approach
It's essential to recognise that successful transformation is holistic. It encompasses the whole organisation and surfaces and optimises the often-hidden interconnected practices that work together to drive innovation, improve efficiency, and deliver exceptional customer experiences. These practices are often accidentally siloed in organisations, and surfacing and interconnecting them is key to a successful digital transformation.
Five digital transformation practices
Let's examine five key digital transformation practices that you need to incorporate together for the success of your digital transformation and the platforms and tools that enable them.
DevOps
DevOps can facilitate seamless integration between development and operations in a cloud-based environment, shortening the development life cycle and increasing deployment frequency. It drives key outcomes including speed, agility, collaboration, and innovation. Using modern tooling like GitLab and the Atlassian suite, you can respond quickly and more easily to market changes and continuously innovate your software.
Cloud
Cloud is a massive enabler for digital transformation, especially in this age of remote, asynchronous working and globally distributed teams. The cloud allows your organisation to get near-instant access to compute and higher-level services, allowing engineers to build innovative and scalable products and services with the minimum of friction.
From apps and machine learning to big data analytics, compute power is essential, and being able to do this without purchasing and maintaining physical servers is a game-changer. Some organisations opt for a hybrid cloud infrastructure, reaping the benefits of public cloud alongside private cloud resources for compute and data that really can't move to the cloud. This hybrid approach can give you portability, vendor flexibility, and the agility your transformation demands.
Agile
Embracing agile methodologies helps teams adapt to changing business and customer requirements. Digital transformation demands change, which means being willing to experiment so you can learn and test new ideas and have a system and culture where this type of thinking can flourish. Failure – where a team realises something doesn't work well – is part of that. Use an agile approach to your digital transformation, ensuring that the project work you do can show incremental improvements and allow for adjustments from learning how things are going as you work towards the longer-term goals and objectives.
ITSM and ESM
Every company is a tech company, with staff and customers relying on and using technology to get work done and have a seamless experience. Proper IT service management (ITSM) helps you organise your IT services around meeting business objectives, while enterprise service management (ESM) extends these principles to other business functions across the enterprise.
With the help of leading tools like Atlassian's Jira Service Management, Gaspar AI, and PeopleCert, ITSM and ESM can enhance your organisation's agility and flexibility, improve service quality, reduce costs, and enhance customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention.
Work management
Lastly, we'd be remiss for not mentioning work management as a key digital transformation practice. We aren't just talking about having the right tools, although the likes of Jira and monday.com can go a long way here. Work management brings together the processes unique to your organisation, your employees' input, and your organisational vision for how you want to work. Effective work management enables your organisation to coordinate and manage tasks efficiently across DevOps, agile, and ITSM practices.
Digital transformation is never 'done'
As we explained earlier, digital transformation is not a one-and-done experience. As technology, customer needs, and market dynamics change, so does this ongoing and evolving strategic initiative. What works well today may be obsolete tomorrow, with significant events such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the rise and rise of generative AI highlighting this more sharply than ever.
As new tools and innovations emerge, you'll face new opportunities to improve efficiency or gain a competitive advantage. And as your business grows or shifts its approach, your digital needs will also change. Digital transformation is about staying relevant and resilient, being agile and flexible enough to adapt to the unexpected and support those changing needs.
How we can help you
As experts with 15 years of experience, we support organisations with end-to-end digital transformations through coaching, implementation, customisation, and training. To help world-leading businesses work better, we use innovative and intelligent digital transformation solutions that optimise value delivery. Our strategic partnerships with monday.com, GitLab, AWS, and Atlassian help us bring the best of these tools to our customers.
We specialise in cloud migrations, DevOps, ITSM and ESM, and agile and work management solutions – the key practices of any digital transformation – and we can provide solutions for all these alongside custom development.
Written by
DevOps Lead
From a background as a Linux sysadmin, Matt is an authority in all things DevOps. At Adaptavist and beyond, he champions DevOps ways of working, helping teams maximise people, process and technology to deliver software efficiently and safely.