Worldwide spending on digital transformation (DX) has accelerated with more than 90% of companies worldwide having adopted cloud technology in 2023 – the highest adoption rate for any emergent technology at the time.
According to McKinsey & Company, approximately 89% of larger organisations have a well-defined digital and AI transformation roadmap. The technology has evolved exponentially, offering companies remarkable potential and return on investment.
However, as McKinsey points out, those large companies have only experienced a 31% increase in revenue and seen only 25% of the promised cost savings.
This means, says Africonology CEO Mandla Mbonambi, that companies need better support to ensure they effectively realise their digital aspirations.
“AWS, Microsoft Azure, Salesforce, MuleSoft and artificial intelligence – these are all solutions and technologies designed to help companies embrace digital transformation, but their integration doesn’t always go exactly to plan,” he continues.
It’s an expensive planning failure. According to Bain & Company, 88% of business transformations don’t reach their original goals. It’s a high failure rate for reasons that a Journal of Business Research study says are hard to pin down. The same journal believes failure is critical to success.
For Mbonambi, this holds true: “DX success relies on understanding where things can go wrong and then building solutions that navigate these risks effectively. Today, we know that change management, strategy, organisational visibility, talent acquisition and future-forward thinking are critical components of any DX integration.”
The risk is that companies often buy into the hype cycle and have integrated tools that aren’t relevant to their business or have limited long-term value. The goal is to start with the basics – can employees use these systems? Will existing technology talk to the new technology? This is where reality and DX collide, leaving companies with big bills and poor performance.
Changing this narrative means recognising that the truth is messy. Legacy systems introduce errors, databases refuse to migrate cleanly. Employees resist changes to workflows they’ve used for decades.
Mbonambi has seen it all: “Cloud isn’t a magic wand and companies often burn through money on failed implementations, but this isn’t the end of the story. Companies can realise their digital aspirations, they just need to build careful integrations using the right combinations that allow for old and new to coexist.”
DX asks for a pragmatic approach that moves away from AI or cloud being a cure-all and instead starts with the unglamorous elements – documenting processes, identifying bottlenecks, and understanding why systems work or don’t work. Solutions like AWS, MuleSoft and AI are powerful.
They are changing the way retailers predict stock levels, mining companies detect equipment failures, and banks detect fraud, but they have to start from the right foundations to achieve these goals and meet DX expectations.
“You need processes that make sense, clean data, and people who understand both the business and the technology,” says Mbonambi. “If you skip these steps, you’re just building a very expensive way to make mistakes quickly. The real value comes from understanding business requirements and the technology capabilities.”
For Africonology, innovation is only one side of the DX coin, the other is to achieve measurable results and ROI by focusing on practical outcomes. Rather than pushing clients to adopt every new technology, the company prioritises tailored solutions designed to address specific needs.
“Cost management and predictability are challenges – variable workloads and complex pricing models can make it difficult to anticipate costs correctly. Our role is to remove these challenges and instead provide organisations with DX solutions that are scalable and affordable,” concludes Mbonambi.
“Hyperscale cloud and smart solutions like MuleSoft, Salesforce and AI will continue to shape the digital landscape. The key is understanding these solutions as enablers of tailored, business outcomes and making choices that empower sustainable digital growth.”