Attempting digital transformation without a clear strategy is like entering a Formula One race with a school-run van: the competition accelerates ahead at high speed while you struggle to move beyond first gear. In such a competitive environment, the interplay between the vehicle, the driver and the decision-making is key and any hesitation only widens the gap.
Across leading organizations, those that stay ahead are the ones that act decisively and manage the change sequence deliberately. This is a pattern we consistently see in clients who achieve meaningful, sustained transformation, such as:
- 27% TCO reduction by retiring legacy infrastructure
- 45% lower running costs after modernizing on cloud
- 100% automated deployment pipelines
Digital transformation isn’t something you can defer anymore. The longer an organisation waits, the higher the operational risk, the wider the competitive gap, and the more expensive the eventual recovery. The fix is straightforward: confront reality early, with a clear diagnostic assessment leveraging all available data and insights, and translate into a precise sequenced roadmap that directs decisions and accelerates execution.
Our North Star: Digital Outcomes Above All
Digital outcomes are our North Star, always guiding how we innovate, collaborate, and deliver. Whether we’re driving process excellence, analytics, IT, design, or engineering, we’re contributing to measurable transformation powered by AI, cloud, automation, and advanced analytics. This unwavering focus on tangible results is what separates transformation theater from real competitive advantage.
Step 1: Establish Your Baseline With a Digital Quotient (DQ)
A Digital Quotient (DQ) assessment gives you a fact-based view of where you are today across strategy, process, culture, and technology. It prevents expensive misfires and creates a shared starting point for the C-suite.
It answers questions like:
- Are our digital initiatives aligned with business outcomes?
- How dependent are we on manual, error-prone processes?
- Do employees have the skills and appetite to adopt new tools?
- Is our data clean, reliable, and usable across the enterprise?
- Do we have the right enterprise security, governance, and compliance postures?
You can extend the view further with targeted assessments (for AI readiness, cloud maturity, or cultural proficiency) to surface gaps in talent, infrastructure, and change appetite. Together, these insights form the foundation for your transformation roadmap.
Step 2: Connect Assessment to Action
An assessment is only valuable if it drives a roadmap. Here’s how to build it as a structured sequence step-by-step:
- Start with impact and feasibility. For each pain point (e.g., data silos, weak process automation, leadership readiness, AI capability), define an initiative with owners, costs, dependencies, and expected outcomes.
- Balance quick wins with foundational efforts, picking a handful of high-impact, low-effort initiatives to build momentum. In parallel, lay the groundwork for larger tasks tomorrow (cloud migration, etc.).
- Plan for obstacles: anticipate resistance to change or skills gaps and plan mitigation upfront.
Transformation typically follows a pattern: assess what’s broken, build a foundation, accelerate improvements, then scale what works. Every organization’s path will be different. What matters is having visibility over trade-offs, prioritization, and adapting as you go.
Atkins is a good example. Together with Sutherland, they took a thorough look at their IT ecosystem, fixed what wasn’t working, and dropped their operating costs by 45% within months. That’s transformation more than paying for itself.
Your First 180 Days
Digital transformation is best approached in sprints, not marathons. Setting up a 180-day plan makes change tangible:
- By Day 30, you have a complete assessment, identified quick wins and strategic outcomes, and ranked priorities.
- By Day 90, the first win is underway, whether that’s automating a critical process, migrating your first workload to the cloud, or deploying AI that cuts manual work by 30%. The initiative depends on your roadmap, but the impact must be undeniable.
- By Day 180, broader platform changes are in progress, and KPIs are trending in the right direction.
This step-by-step model aligns with Sutherland’s six enablers of transformation, ensuring every win builds towards enterprise-wide impact:
- Digital assessment and advisory
- Application Modernization and Migration
- Digital quality assurance
- Packaged and custom applications
- Cloud infrastructure
- Data engineering
Your Next Move
Digital transformation builds and maintains momentum through a structured set of steps. And first comes an honest assessment of your Digital Quotient. From there, you can set priorities, prove value quickly, and build the culture, processes and platforms that sustain long-term change.
Ready to get started? Discover our comprehensive framework for digitalizing your core capabilities, complete with practical advice to guide each stage of your journey forward:
- A four-step maturity assessment to uncover where you stand today, highlight common pitfalls, and map out what needs to happen to scale transformation.
- A clear, phased migration model for updating legacy systems.
- Cloud optimization guidance to build resilience, scalability, and security so your future growth isn’t held back by brittle platforms.
- A modern application strategy that balances packaged and custom solutions, so you can move quickly without sacrificing flexibility.
- Data engineering supports building reliable, real-time pipelines helping you trust decisions and power analytics.
- Embedded quality assurance practices across your digital stack to prevent live failures, protect customer experience, and ensure compliance even as you change fast.
