Digital Transformation

Digital transformation services are advisory programs that change process, structure and product together, so that technology changes what a company competes on rather than how quickly it runs the model it already has. Vivaldi has done this work since 1999, for companies including Scout24, Lionbridge, KWS, Pfizer and Landsec.

• Since 1999digital and business model transformation
• 200+published case studies
• 10 officeson four continents
• 5xWirtschaftsWoche Best of Consulting, Strategy and Innovation

When companies bring us in

Digital transformation is usually bought by a CEO, COO or transformation lead at a large organization that has already spent heavily on digital. The trigger is almost never a planning cycle. It is a specific moment when the gap between the spend and the result becomes impossible to present.

• After a large digital program that cannot show what changed. Systems migrated, processes digitized, headcount roughly the same, margin roughly the same, and no clear answer to what the company now does differently.
• When a new technology wave lands on top of an unfinished one. The board is asked to fund the next investment before the last one has demonstrated a return, which is the pattern behind the gap between AI investment and the results executives were promised.
• At an inflection point. The current model still works and the trajectory has turned, which is the hardest version of this problem to fund. We wrote about that pattern in our note on inflection points.
• Before a platform or ERP decision. A multi-year technology commitment is about to be made and nobody has established which business model it is meant to serve.
• When a competitor changes the basis of competition. Not a better version of the same offer, but a different thing being sold, usually with different economics underneath it.

Why digitizing the operating model is not transformation

Most transformation programs change what the company runs on and leave how it decides untouched. That is a re-platforming, and it is almost always sold, funded and reported as a transformation.

The word covers three programs with three different economics, and confusing them is expensive. Digitization takes an analog process and makes it digital: the process is unchanged, only faster and cheaper. Digital reformation replicates existing processes with digital investment, so structure, product and business model stay as they were and the same thing happens more efficiently through a new channel. Digital transformation changes process, structure and product, so technology reframes the business model and what value the company delivers.

All three are legitimate. Efficiency is real, and a company that cannot run a digital channel well has no business attempting a model change. The problem is not that reformation happens. It is that reformation gets a transformation budget and a transformation narrative, so the board never learns which one it bought, and the next program is scoped on the same mistake.

This also explains why maturity models are poor instruments here. A maturity model tells you how your technology estate compares to a benchmark. It cannot tell you what to build, because it was never derived from where your demand is going. Nor is the usual failure technical. A genuinely new opportunity arrives at an organization that has no practice at changing, because change capability was scheduled after the strategy instead of designed alongside it. A system that speeds up execution and leaves approval rights where they were has bought you nothing.

What our digital transformation services include

Five bodies of work. They are decisions rather than deliverables, and most engagements use three or four of them rather than all five.

1. Classifying the digital portfolio you already fund

We start with the spend in flight rather than with a technology assessment, because the fastest way to find out what a company believes transformation is, is to read what it has already funded under that heading.

• Every initiative in flight sorted into digitization, reformation or transformation
• The business case each one is actually carrying, as distinct from the one it was approved on
• Governance that stops a transformation budget quietly financing efficiency projects, and prices each class separately

2. Where demand is moving and what you have a right to win

We work back from where demand will pool, rather than forward from current capability. This is the argument that capital allocation does not create value and future demand does, applied to a technology budget.

• The demand spaces forming around the category, and which of them the company has permission to enter
• What the business model would have to become to serve them, including what it would stop doing
• What that implies for process, structure and product, in that order, before any platform is chosen

3. Redesigning the business model rather than the stack

The deliverable here is a different company, described precisely enough to be costed. Technology selection follows it and does not lead it.

• How value is created, delivered and charged for under the new model
• Which assets become a platform for others rather than a product sold once
• The sequence, since very few organizations can change product, structure and process in one move

4. Decision rights and the change capability

The organization is part of the design, not a rollout phase at the end of it.

• Decision rights examined alongside the technology, because unchanged approval paths will absorb any speed the new system creates
• The behaviors the new model requires, named before the platform is selected rather than trained afterwards
• A feedback path, so what the first initiative teaches changes how the second is scoped

5. Tying the program to economic profit

We trace the program through the Compound Economic Profit Loop, published by our team in WARC in 2026: demand space, right to win, then price, volume and capital intensity, then the spread between return on invested capital and the cost of capital. A transformation that cannot be traced to that chain is a re-platforming, whatever the slide says.

• A measurement model built on economic profit rather than systems migrated or processes digitized
• Reporting that keeps the three programs visible and separately accountable
• The earliest honest evidence the model is moving, which is the first decision that gets made differently

How a digital transformation engagement works

1. Classify. Every digital initiative in flight sorted by class, with the return each one can credibly produce. The output is an honest picture of what the current program is, which is frequently the most contested document of the engagement.
2. Decide. Demand spaces, right to win, and the business model the company is trying to become. Tested with customers and stress-tested with finance. The output is a decision with the exclusions written down.
3. Design. Process, structure, product and decision rights designed together, sequenced, and costed. Technology is selected against this, not before it.
4. Embed. Governance, a measurement model tied to economic profit, and the internal capability to run the next change without us.

Where this has been done

Three published engagements, and they are deliberately not all the same program. One changed a business model, one changed what a company was positioned to sell, and one was a prioritization exercise that we would classify as reformation rather than transformation.

Scout24. Scout24 was the umbrella brand over a set of digital marketplaces that had grown organically and by acquisition, each on its own systems. We ran consumer research with our DemandFirst methodology and identified seven opportunity platforms at the intersection of consumer needs and offering features, which showed that the vertical brands were crowding each other inside two of them. Rather than connecting the sub-brands to customers at separate touchpoints, we recommended a holistic customer journey across them, and the company moved from an online marketplace toward a best match across all offerings. The case describes the outcome as a roadmap for a radical digital business transformation. Read it here: Scout24’s digital transformation journey.

Lionbridge. A translation provider under pressure from digital disruption and new competition. Instead of defending the pipeline business, we led the team through a reinvention of the business model into a multi-sided platform connecting its network of over 100,000 language professionals with customers who had specialized needs. Conventional practice in the industry was to brand the service offering. We recommended positioning the company around its people instead, and carried that through the digital strategy and the global identity. Read it here: discovering a platform hidden in plain sight.

KWS. KWS SAAT AG is the fifth largest seed producer worldwide based on sales, with activities in about 70 countries. It had introduced digital tools sporadically over the years without clear customer focus or strategic alignment. We built a scorecard to assess the existing initiatives, benchmarked competitors and practice outside the industry, and produced a digital roadmap covering what to revamp, what to add and what to launch. KWS has implemented some of the quick wins, and the roadmap now serves as a reference guide for digital decisions. That is a reformation program run properly, and naming it as one is the point: it was the right program for where the company was. Read it here: plotting a digital roadmap for KWS’s transformation.

Why companies choose Vivaldi for digital transformation

We are a strategy firm, not a systems integrator, and we have no implementation revenue to protect. That changes the advice. A firm that sells the build has a structural reason to find a build, and the classification work above is precisely the work that can conclude a client should spend less.

The second reason is that we come at this from demand rather than from the technology estate. The questions we open with are which demand spaces are forming and which of them the company has a right to win, because those answers determine what the model has to become, and the model determines the technology. Running that sequence backwards is how a company ends up with an excellent platform serving a business nobody chose.

The third is that we will tell you when you need the cheaper program. If the current model is sound and execution is slow, that is a reformation, we will say so, and we will scope it as one.

How to evaluate a digital transformation consultant

Worth asking of any firm on your shortlist, including us.

• Ask them to classify your current portfolio. Digitization, reformation or transformation, initiative by initiative, before any proposal. A firm that will not do this on your existing spend will not do it on its own.
• Ask what changes about how decisions get made. If the answer is only systems and processes, you are buying efficiency. That is fine, as long as it is priced as efficiency.
• Ask how long they say it takes. Reformation is quarters. Transformation is years. A firm promising transformation in two quarters is selling reformation under a better name.
• Ask what they would have to stop selling you if the answer is no build. The size of that number tells you how much of the recommendation was available to be independent.
• Ask who owns the change capability afterwards. If the organization cannot run the next change without them, you bought a system rather than a company that can adapt.

Strategy firm, systems integrator or large management consultancy?

Related work

Transformation rarely arrives alone. Four connected pieces:

• New business models if the question is what the business becomes rather than how it runs.
• Gen AI strategy if the current wave of technology is what forced the question.
• Change management if the strategy is settled and the organization is the constraint.
• Organizational design if decision rights are what the new model is waiting on.

This work sits inside our Competitive Strategy practice, part of Business Strategy and Transformation at Vivaldi, the strategy firm behind the Demand Landscape and the Interaction Field.

Digital transformation services in the US and worldwide

Our transformation work runs out of ten offices on four continents, with the US team in New York. Most of these engagements are multi-market by necessity, because the three programs rarely sit at the same stage in every region. A business can be running a genuinely new model in one market while the same company digitizes paper in another, and a single global maturity score hides exactly that. Where the model has already changed somewhere in the business is usually the most useful evidence available, and it is the first place we look.