Too many digital transformation efforts in UK businesses do not fail on the technology. They fail quietly in meeting rooms, steering groups and inboxes where strategy, leadership and execution drift away from each other rather than move as one.
When transformation feels like background noise
Digital transformation now sits in almost every board pack. The language is familiar, the diagrams look similar, and yet the lived experience in many organisations is oddly flat. Projects drag on, people grow tired, and what began as a strategic shift starts to feel like background noise rather than a decisive move in the market.
What appears repeatedly is not a lack of ambition. It is an absence of crisp intent. Senior teams talk about becoming more digital, more data driven, more automated, but struggle to articulate what that means in practical terms for a customer, a branch manager or a frontline adviser. Once that clarity is missing, the technology starts to drive the agenda, and strategy tries to keep up.
Strategy that never quite lands
In many SME environments the pattern is similar. A founder or chief executive senses a competitive threat, commissions a digital roadmap, approves a significant spend, and then oscillates between intense involvement and sudden distance. Strategy becomes a document that no one quite wants to challenge, yet no one truly owns.
Where this becomes most visible, is in decision thresholds. The organisation invests in platforms and tools without taking the slower step of defining where value is genuinely created and what needs to change in order to reach it. A national initiative such as the BBC Digital Media Initiative showed how expensive this can become when success is never clearly defined and no one has both the authority and the will to say enough and reset. The scale is different in an SME, but the underlying pattern is uncomfortably similar.
Leadership as accelerator and brake
Leadership behaviour can either clean up this ambiguity or amplify it. A founder who insists on signing off every configuration choice in a system that he does not fully understand does not create control. He creates delay and confusion. Equally, an executive team that delegates the entire transformation to a project office and treats it as an item on the agenda rather than the agenda, will signal that this is optional work, not strategic work.
There is a recurring distortion in founder led businesses. The story of Auto Windscreens, where a bold systems overhaul contributed to the collapse of the business, is a sharp reminder that technology programmes can expose weaknesses in governance and leadership rather than conceal them. When there is more interest in how transformation looks in a presentation than how it works on the shop floor, the initiative starts to serve the leadership ego rather than the business model.
People, systems and the quiet resistance
People rarely resist technology in the abstract. They resist feeling foolish, marginalised or ignored. A top down digital programme that arrives with limited explanation and thin training invites quiet non‑compliance. The NHS National Programme for IT struggled in part because clinicians felt that technology was being done to them rather than with them, and insufficient time was invested in bringing them into the design in a meaningful way.
Legacy systems and data silos then interact with this human resistance. Many organisations underestimate how entangled their existing processes, spreadsheets and informal workarounds have become. Integrating modern platforms into that environment is not a clean exercise in system replacement. It is a slow unwinding of logic built up over years. Without patient, technically literate leadership the programme can start to feel like an attack on the organisation’s own memory.
Customers, adoption and learned caution
There is also the outside view. When digital initiatives focus heavily on internal efficiency and only lightly on customer reality, the result can feel strangely hollow. The experience of NHS Scotland’s app, designed as a digital front door to services but criticised for limited functionality, illustrates how seductive it can be to ship a solution in search of a problem. Customers learn quickly to route around technology that does not genuinely help them.
Across multiple mandates over the past twelve years, Sivgen has seen this pattern repeat in smaller ways in mid‑market and SME settings, from retail networks to specialist services. The organisations that make genuine progress are rarely the loudest about transformation. They are often the ones that move carefully, link technology choices back to a small number of strategic moves, invest more time than feels comfortable in training, and remain willing to pause a project when the original question no longer feels quite right. It is striking how often the real shift comes not from a grand launch, but from a series of quiet decisions that slowly align people, technology and strategy around a clearer sense of where the business is actually trying to go.