Digital enablement: The strategy your transformation forgot

Why visibility, architecture and readiness matter more than your next platform rollout.

Digital Transformation has become the corporate mantra of the decade. It’s in every strategy deck, every conference keynote, and every tech vendor pitch. But after years of chasing innovation, many organisations are waking up to the same uncomfortable reality: despite the buzz, they’re not all that transformed.

The reason? A lack of enablement.

“Digital Transformation without digital enablement is like attempting a renovation using only a hammer. And yet it’s surprisingly common — systems are rebranded, apps are re-launched, cloud credits are burned, but the underlying complexity, fragmentation and risk remain. The result is not long-term resilience or agility. It’s what I call ‘surface-level digital’: initiatives that look modern on the outside but are fundamentally misaligned underneath,” explains Tony van der Linden, BBD CIO.

The illusion of progress

He goes on to say that when speaking to industry leaders, from banks and insurers to telcos and public sector institutions, a consistent theme emerges: there’s been a lot of motion, but not always forward movement. Many have embraced new tools, adopted cloud services, or digitised processes. But fewer have stepped back to ask the bigger questions.

Are our systems architected to evolve? Can we scale without chaos? Is our tech aligned to business outcomes — or just activity?

These questions are at the heart of digital enablement, but too often they go unanswered in the rush to ‘transform.’

“It’s not that transformation isn’t important. But it needs structure, clarity, and the right foundations. Without that, organisations risk falling into what we at BBD call technical theatre: impressive-sounding deployments that don’t meaningfully reduce risk, improve performance, or support long-term goals,” notes van der Linden.

Digital enablement: a foundation, not a feature

True digital enablement is less flashy, but far more strategic. It’s what makes transformation sustainable. It’s the capability to evolve on your terms, to modernise safely, scale sensibly, and deliver outcomes that hold up five years from now, not just five Sprints.

BBD defines digital enablement as the intersection of architecture, insight, and readiness. It’s not about what you deploy — it’s about what you enable your business to do next.

This starts with visibility. “Our FOCUS framework, for instance, is a 12-lens diagnostic used to assess everything from architecture and infrastructure to skills, governance, and experience. The idea isn’t to score vendors or assign blame, it’s to surface hidden technical debt, skills debt and misalignments that silently block progress. Without this view, it’s impossible to know where to optimise or where risk lives” explains van der Linden.

But enablement goes beyond diagnosis. It’s about activating change — with clear roadmaps, fit-for-purpose tooling, modular architectures, and strong UX foundations. It’s about equipping your teams with the right processes, patterns and culture to deliver at speed; without burning out or breaking things. It is about creating opportunities for your employees to pay back the skills debt they have incurred over time. And it’s about building systems that adapt as your business evolves — not ones that get replaced every five years.

Why so many get stuck

So why don’t more organisations take this approach? In short: pressure and noise.

In a market that rewards speed, there’s often an implicit belief that faster means better. But speed without strategy leads to rework. And in the long run, rework costs far more than doing it right from the start.

There’s also a tendency to outsource strategy to AI and associated tools. We’ve seen businesses ‘transform’ by deploying new CRM platforms or microservices stacks, only to find that their people, processes, and governance weren’t ready to support it.

“Enablement doesn’t resist technology — but it insists on using it well. That means assessing readiness before rollout. It means training teams, refining interfaces, automating intelligently, and architecting for performance and scale. It means architecting your platforms not just for today’s use case, but tomorrow’s unknowns” he notes. Read more about the role of technology in digital transformation projects here.

Five questions to ask before you ‘transform’

To move from transformation to enablement, van der Linden encourages businesses to step back and ask:

Enablement in action

The good news? When done right, digital enablement delivers real, measurable impact.

Van der Linden explains that BBD has helped clients consolidate fragmented platforms into unified customer experiences, reducing costs and boosting reliability. They’ve built scalable SaaS systems for thousands of users, and delivered cloud migrations that improved security while reducing their total cost of ownership. In every case, the difference wasn’t just the tech — it was the clarity, structure and strategic intent behind it.

That’s what sets enablement apart. It doesn’t just modernise — it multiplies your ability to deliver value.

Outlasting the noise

Digital transformation might be a buzzword. But digital enablement? That’s your moat.

It’s what protects your business from instability. It’s what gives your teams confidence to build, experiment and scale. It’s what future-proofs your platforms, aligns your decisions, and ensures your investments keep paying off.

So the next time you hear someone pitch a transformation project, ask a simple question: Is this built to last — or just built to look good?

BBD knows which one we’d bet on.