Peter Bendor-Samuel, CEO of Everest Group—a management consulting and research firm, wrote a Forbes article titled “How to Avoid Frustrating, Mistaken Approach to Digital Transformation.” He covered why digital transformation takes so much time, how to get value out of your digital journey sooner rather than later, and what mistake to avoid when developing your approach for digital transformation.

Why Does the Digital Journey Take So Long?

Peter identified two essential parts of a digital transformation:

1. Building or composing a digital platform
2. Changing the company’s operating model to take full advantage of the digital platform and execute business in a different and more profound way

It is important to execute these two parts simultaneously. It is difficult to change your operating model quickly in order to accelerate the implementation of technology. People need time to go through a learning curve in order to understand the technology and how it will affect the way they work. The changes in your operating model will help your company understand what technology you need, which will help you recompose your digital platform.

How to Get Value Sooner

According to the article, the best approach to managing a multi-year digital transformation is to break it down into short-burst sprints. Peter explained that this “sprint approach” helps move away from heavy waterfall approaches that have big plans and big budgets, which he calls the M2M approach (initiatives that take many millions and many months).

A digital transformation should be broken into small projects that provide you with the chance to articulate value and complete the project in a couple of months with a modest amount of money. Working in these short-burst sprints will help your organization work more effectively and produce better outcomes.

At the end of the day, the combination of all of these short sprints will still take roughly three to five years before you see significant progress. Evolving to a new operating model takes time, but it’s worth it because it results in a better experience for your customers, employees and partners.

Avoid the Technology-First Mistake

Many companies take on the “sprint approach” to digital transformation. However, a sprint approach can tend to be more technology focused, which leads to being more platform focused. Peter explained that this will take your company down a path of collecting technologies that have to be integrated into your platform. The problem is that these technologies don’t come in isolation. Peter went on to explain that digital technologies “quickly demand a level of competence across a broad set of companion technologies, and some of these additional technologies also have their own sets of companion technologies.” Implementing technologies is not a “one and done” deal. It’s important to keep digital capabilities moving forward.

Despite challenges, a sprint approach is still seen as the best approach to achieving value in a digital transformation. However, it is important to not let your journey become a technology-first approach. Develop your approach around the experience that you desire for your customers, employees and ecosystem partners. Once you’ve decided what that experience looks like, you can implement technology that enables that experience and success within your organization.