Hi Reader,

I hope this email finds you well! I have some good news to share about the manuscript, and then I want to get right to this week’s excerpt.

I recently had the manuscript go through a developmental assessment. Here are a few things that came back that I’m genuinely excited about:

• The three-ingredient framework — Preparation, Execution, and Assimilation — was called out as a genuinely differentiated model that goes well beyond the surface-level advice that fills most business books on this topic.
• The journey metaphor was identified as one of the book’s greatest structural strengths. It provides a coherent thread across all four parts of the book without feeling forced or overworked.
• The Technology Roadmap section was flagged as a standout contribution — specifically the idea that the roadmap is a living document, not a static project artifact. That framing resonated strongly.
• Part 4, which covers what I call the Sustain stage, was singled out as one of the most important and underrepresented topics in the DX literature. The feedback was that this section alone could justify a leader picking up the book.

That last point is what inspired this week’s excerpt. The Sustain stage is the part of digital transformation that almost nobody talks about — and almost everybody gets wrong. I’d love to hear your reaction to it.

Excerpt from The Digital Transformation Guidebook

Chapter 12: Do You Know If Your Digital Transformation Initiative Was Truly a Success?

Go-Live Is Not the Finish Line

Achieving a successful system implementation is only the first step in any digital transformation journey. Many CXOs view go-live as the finish line, but in reality, it’s the starting point of a much larger effort. Simply having the right systems and processes in place doesn’t guarantee that your desired business outcomes will naturally follow.

Most implementation plans end shortly after go-live. I’ve seen it time and time again: once a company reaches go-live, there may be a plan in place for enhanced support and possibly additional end-user training, but there are seldom any plans to assess the business impact of the implementation. As a result, after spending millions of dollars and many sleepless nights, a company seldom knows if their implementation realized the intended benefits.

The Dangerous Assumptions Leaders Make After Go-Live

This reality stems from a few common assumptions:

Assumption #1: Once users are trained, they will follow the process.

The truth is change is hard. Even with the best training and communication efforts, there will still be a learning curve for end-users as they adjust to new systems, processes, and ways of working.

Assumption #2: After go-live, all that’s left is to fix minor bugs or optimize a few areas.

No matter how much testing and preparation is done, there will always be unexpected issues and areas for improvement that arise after go-live. It’s important to have a plan in place to address these issues and continuously optimize the system.

The reality is, using a new system does NOT automatically mean a business has been transformed.

Go-live is not the finish line, but rather the starting gate for transformation.

When leaders fail to understand this and neglect to continue fostering the transformation well after go-live, several problems can occur:

• Team members don’t understand why processes have changed and revert back to previous practices.
• Team members spend time trying to accomplish old procedures in new systems rather than using the newly designed processes and spending time savings on new, value-added tasks.
• The new systems or processes don’t function as well as expected, leading to a loss in ROI.
• Little to no data measurements are implemented, so the company is not aware if they have truly achieved their original goals.

Introducing the Sustain Stage

If you want to experience true transformation and know whether you’ve achieved your desired outcomes, you must put into practice activities that will monitor, measure, and maintain the results of your digital transformation initiative. This is the final stage in Digital Transformation. I call it the Sustain stage.

After preparing and executing a large transformation, you must take proactive measures to sustain the changes. This process rests on three core pillars: Monitor, Measure, and Maintain.

First, you must put into practice activities that will monitor and measure the results of the initiative. Then, if your implementation has not achieved the desired outcomes, you must implement changes until you do achieve them. Finally, you must regularly continue this process in order to maintain the outcomes and become a truly transformed business.

The Sustain stage helps organizations implement a culture of innovation and continuous improvement by shifting the focus from a project methodology — implementing an initiative — to a process methodology — maintaining and continuously improving your transformed business processes and capabilities. Moreover, activities in the Sustain stage empower your team members to truly understand how to be successful in their role and encourage them to look for ways to innovate. Empowered team members become excited for change and limit the risk of change fatigue.

This critical stage of digital transformation provides leaders with a clear and measurable ROI for the initiative, demonstrating not only that you have met your goals but also that you are positioned to exceed them and drive ongoing growth. It’s during this stage that companies become truly agile, adapting quickly to changes, and staying ahead of their competition.

Is the Sustain Stage Really Worth It?

You may wonder, “Is it really worth the extra effort?” I understand the question. After finishing a long, arduous project, the last thing you want to think about is continuous improvement. Your team may be burned out and just want to coast for a while. Maybe you have other initiatives waiting in the background that you don’t want to keep putting off. While these are real concerns, take a minute to consider what the cost is of NOT taking time to sustain your transformation.

If there are pain points from the implementation that go unresolved, your team will become more burned out. Moreover, if users aren’t following the new processes, it generally takes months to even realize it without active monitoring. At that point, not only have you experienced a loss of efficiency over those months, but resolving the issues is much more difficult and costly because it requires breaking bad habits that have already set in.

Finally, jumping into the next initiative without properly sustaining the initiative you just completed likely means you will never fully realize the benefits of that initiative and your ROI will be significantly lower or possibly non-existent.

If you’ve invested the time and resources to implement a large-scale digital transformation, why wouldn’t you invest an additional — yet relatively smaller — amount of time and resources to ensure it delivers on its expected promises?

Stop treating your post-go-live activities as an afterthought and start treating them as the essential keys to success they are.

Do You Know If Your Digital Transformation Initiative Was Truly a Success?

When your organization invests significant resources in a digital transformation initiative like an ERP implementation, it should be more than just a project — it should be a leap forward in modernizing your business operations. But here’s the critical question: how do you really measure success?

Is it just about going live without major disruptions? Many organizations stop there. The system is up, workflows are functional, and employees have adapted. By that measure, everything may look fine. But did you actually achieve the business goals that justified the transformation in the first place? Without the right measures in place, the answer may surprise you.

Consider this common scenario: you’ve launched an ERP solution. A few weeks after go-live, departments are functioning without significant errors, and there are no critical tickets in the IT queue. By traditional standards, many organizations would call this a success. But these surface-level indicators offer no insight into whether the initiative delivered on its core promise — helping the business achieve its objectives.

Some businesses also place heavy reliance on predefined KPIs, assuming they’re enough to ensure business success. While KPIs are valuable for day-to-day performance monitoring, they often fail to capture:

• Process effectiveness.
• Organizational adoption of new workflows.
• System health (beyond basic issue tracking).
• Long-term sustainability of improvements.

Without these comprehensive measurements in place, you risk making false assumptions, ignoring critical inefficiencies, and potentially derailing your original business objectives.

Success isn’t just about delivering the project. It’s about measurable outcomes that drive real business value. To truly understand the impact of your digital transformation, you need to do more than track on-time project completion or count the absence of complaints. Success starts with clear, measurable objectives and a framework that aligns implementation results with the broader goals of your business.

This excerpt is longer than usual, but I wanted to give you a meaningful look at Part 4, which I think is one of the most important sections of the book. I’d love to hear whether this resonates with what you’ve experienced. Have you been in an organization that declared victory at go-live and then struggled to realize the intended benefits? Please hit reply and let me know.

I hope you found this email useful. If you would like to talk to me you can use the button below to schedule a time on my calendar.

Kind regards,

Tory Bjorklund