PMs Need To Get Ready for Digital Transformation

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Change Management  

Over the last few years, IDC, a company that provides market intelligence and advisory services around technology, has been monitoring digital transformation. Some of their predictions of the investment in the concept have been dramatic, but they’ve also proven to be reasonably accurate.

In October 2019, it predicted that global spending on digital transformation would hit $2.3 trillion annually by 2023. Obviously, that was before the pandemic hit, so that number no longer holds true. But in preparing to write this article, I revisited IDC’s forecasts and was shocked to say the least. (More on that in a minute…)

First, let’s consider what happened as far as digital transformation is concerned when the pandemic caused so many organizations to shift to a virtual working model. At the end of April 2020, Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, said “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months.” (I’m not sure that’s precisely accurate, as I address in Has Digital Transformation Really Accelerated?, but there has certainly been an acceleration.)

At the same time, organizations found themselves with less money to invest as a result of the global economic downturn—and you might expect that to create a bit of a drag on digital transformation efforts after the initial surge as the world went …

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