The pattern is familiar. An organisation decides to digitally transform. A platform is selected — cloud, ERP, CRM, data platform, take your pick. A large implementation programme kicks off. Eighteen months later, the technology is live, adoption is poor, the promised efficiency gains haven't materialised, and the organisation is largely working around the system rather than through it.
The technology worked. The transformation didn't. And the reason, almost universally, is that the operating model was never redesigned. The new system was installed on top of old processes, old roles, old decision rights, and old incentives. You cannot get new outcomes from old ways of working, regardless of how sophisticated the tooling is.
The Operating Model Comes First
An operating model defines how an organisation creates value: how work flows, how decisions are made, how teams are structured, how performance is measured, and how capabilities are built and maintained. It is the organisational logic that determines whether a given set of tools will be used effectively or ignored.
When a transformation starts with the operating model, the technology selection question changes fundamentally. Instead of "which platform has the best features?" the question becomes "which platform best supports the way we need to work?" That's a much more tractable question, and it tends to produce implementations that actually stick.
What Operating Model Redesign Involves
This is not an abstract exercise. In practice, operating model redesign before a technology programme involves:
- Clarifying the target state. What does good look like in two to three years? What decisions will be made differently? What will be automated? What capabilities need to exist that don't today?
- Mapping current state honestly. Where does work actually flow versus where it's supposed to flow? Where are the handoff failures, the decision bottlenecks, the informal workarounds that the current system depends on?
- Designing the future-state roles and processes. Technology can automate tasks, but it cannot redesign accountability. Someone needs to decide what the new roles look like and what the new process flows are before the system is configured to support them.
- Aligning incentives. If performance management still rewards the old behaviours, the new ways of working won't take hold no matter how good the training is.
Technology as an Enabler, Not a Driver
The organisations that succeed at transformation use technology to accelerate a way of working they have already designed, not to discover one they haven't. The sequencing matters enormously. Start with the operating model — what needs to be true about how you work — and let that drive the technology choices and implementation decisions that follow.
This approach is slower at the start and faster overall. It requires real decisions to be made by real decision-makers before the implementation begins. It requires leadership commitment that goes well beyond signing a business case. But it is the only sequencing that reliably produces the outcomes the original investment was intended to generate.