As IT professionals and enterprise decision-makers, we’ve routinely used the time period “digital transformation” for nicely over a decade now to explain a portfolio of enterprise initiatives that in some way magically allow strategic enterprise capabilities. In the end, the intent, nevertheless, is usually at odds with measurably helpful outcomes. Transformation initiatives often defy gravity when it comes to what’s sensible and practical for contemporary enterprises with legacy functions and infrastructure, but we persist in funding them on a big scale and positioning them as worth and outcome-driven  

Once we take into account the implications of fastened infrastructure prices and capex investments, efforts like cloud migration, enterprise information platforms, robotic course of automation (RPA), and API-first initiatives offered an virtually irresistible alternative to allow and unlock enterprise capabilities and worth. What we constantly missed had been the direct and oblique penalties of disruption to enterprise continuity, the challenges of acquisitions and divestitures, the calls for of integration and interoperability for giant enterprises and, most of all, the unimpressive observe file for many enterprise transformation efforts. The scorecard speaks for itself. A examine by McKinsey discovered that less than 30% of digital transformation initiatives are successful in attaining their aims. For big enterprises, the success fee is even decrease, with estimates hovering round 16-20% because of the scale and complexity of the initiatives. 

The API-first period 

In 2012, as a software program architect in a worldwide sportswear and attire enterprise, it grew to become clear to me in the course of the API-first period that transformation was now not a matter of lofty ambitions that included monolithic service bus implementations, refactoring, reverse engineering or re-engineering in-house functions together with infrastructure modernization. Later, as an enterprise architect in consumer-packaged items, I may now not realistically ponder a world the place IT may execute mass utility portfolio migrations from information facilities to cloud and SaaS-based functions and survive the associated fee, threat and time-to-market implications. Our commitments to the companies we supported as architects had been perpetually at odds with actuality. A tectonic shift was shifting us all from monolithic architectures to self-service fashions and an existential disaster for structure and IT was upon us.