Most companies think digital transformation budgets buy innovation.
They don’t.
A surprising share of the money pays for something else.
Complexity.
Recently, Martin Fowler argued that organizations are no longer dealing only with technical debt. They’re also accumulating cognitive debt and intent debt: the loss of shared understanding and the reasons behind past decisions.
That observation explains something I’ve seen for years.
A digital transformation rarely starts with building the future.
It starts by paying interest on the past.
Legacy integrations.
Data cleanup.
Governance layers.
Approvals.
Exceptions.
Workarounds.
None of these create competitive advantage.
They simply allow the business to keep moving.
The uncomfortable question for every executive isn’t:
“How much are we investing in digital transformation?”
It’s:
“How much of that investment is actually creating new value, and how much is just compensating for the complexity we’ve accumulated over the years?”
The technology is rarely the biggest cost.
Complexity is.
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