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Summary – In the absence of lasting structures, your digital initiatives spike in efficiency before fading: diluted responsibilities, unclear priorities, and ad hoc maintenance hinder progress and inflate digital debt. One-off projects deliver fast (MVP/POC) but collapse without sustainable integration for lack of clear roles, end-to-end workflows, and formal governance.
Solution: establish dedicated roles (product/process/data owners), formalize processes, and create a permanent steering committee to turn each project into continuous evolution.
Most companies approach digital transformation as a series of temporary initiatives: a roadmap, a pilot, a rollout. These efforts create a surge in efficiency and deliver quick wins but struggle to generate lasting impact.
A few months after go-live, everything dissipates: responsibilities diffuse, priorities blur, and the ability to evolve stalls. The real challenge isn’t technical but organizational: without dedicated internal structures, digitalization stagnates. Let’s explore how to shift from a series of standalone projects to a structured, business-IT aligned system to build an enduring enterprise digital transformation.
The Paradox of Digital Projects
Digital projects enable you to launch, test, and deliver new solutions quickly. However, as temporary initiatives, they don’t integrate into the organization’s long-term structure.
Short-Term Efficiency
Digital projects are designed to deliver a defined scope within a short timeframe. They assemble cross-functional teams, concentrate decision-making, and generate positive momentum. This approach allows you to test new tools or processes with a controlled budget and visible results within the first few months, following an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) logic.
This agile format also facilitates team buy-in, since responsibilities are temporary and the scope is clear. Project sponsors benefit from tight governance and structured reporting, meeting the demands of executive management and CIOs/CTOs.
However, this “proof of concept” phase can obscure the need for a broader, both organizational and technical, integration into existing business processes.
The Ephemeral Nature of Projects
By definition, a project is time-bound. Once the goal is met, the dedicated governance stops, project committees disband, and the sponsor moves on. Teams then focus on new initiatives, and the traceability of past decisions becomes unclear.
This temporality is a strength for rapidly initiating digital transformation, but it creates a void once the project closes. POCs do not automatically transform into sustainable solutions: evolution and maintenance are managed ad hoc, without a defined roadmap.
The contradiction is striking: what accelerates digitalization often prevents its sustainability, because the organization doesn’t adapt to take over.
What Happens After Project Closure
The lack of defined roles and responsibilities creates a decision-making vacuum. Once the project ends, no one takes ownership of ongoing governance or arbitration.
Key Roles Disappear
During the project phase, product owners, process owners, and data owners are clearly identified. They schedule sprints, prioritize user stories, and approve deliverables. This clarity ensures functional and technical coherence.
After delivery, these roles disappear. Business teams no longer know whom to approach for enhancements, and IT becomes a mere executor, without decision-making power. Tickets pile up, digital debt grows, and responsiveness declines.
This phenomenon generates latent conflicts: each party believes the roadmap belongs to the other, and the system remains stuck without a permanent driver.
Decision-Making Ambiguity and Incoherent Prioritization
Without structured governance, decisions are made ad hoc. Urgent requests get fast-tracked, while strategic priorities wither for lack of arbitration. The shared backlog becomes a catch-all, with no scoring criteria or steering committee.
This absence of rules leads to frequent pivots, redundancies, and cost overruns. Teams navigate blindly, with no shared KPIs or coherent scaling plan.
The risk, then, is that the initial digital tool loses its value because it evolves not according to real business needs but in response to one-off emergencies.
Example: A Cantonal Administration
A Swiss public service set up a digital requests portal for its citizens. The project, executed in agile mode, was praised for its intuitive interface and reduced processing times.
After go-live, the project manager left the organization, and no governance processes were formalized. Regulatory updates were deferred, leading to non-compliance and a 35% increase in support calls.
This case illustrates that even technically flawless public projects can fail without sustainable decision-making structures.
Edana: strategic digital partner in Switzerland
We support companies and organizations in their digital transformation
The Impact of Missing Organizational Structures
Without a dedicated digital organization, every new enhancement is treated as a new project, slowing down decisions and aging systems.
Proliferation of Ad Hoc Projects
Whenever a change request arises, it is handled as an isolated mini-project. Teams repeat the full cycle of analysis, estimation, and testing without reusing prior work or leveraging lessons learned.
This siloed approach creates redundancies: several teams may develop similar modules in the absence of a global vision. Development and maintenance costs skyrocket, and system coherence declines.
This phenomenon is particularly critical for SMEs and mid-sized companies with limited IT resources. Without structure, each enhancement becomes a financial and organizational drain.
Aging Systems and Technical Stagnation
A lack of a cross-functional IT roadmap leads to unchecked application aging. Security and performance updates are postponed for fear of disrupting operations, which increases technical debt.
Over time, the accumulation of layers and forks makes any modification complex. New features require workarounds, hindering scalability and system resilience. Digital debt thus becomes a major barrier to innovation.
Without a long-term vision, an organization’s digitalization remains fragmented, lacking true architectural and functional coherence.
Example: A Swiss Service Company
A financial services firm had multiplied digital projects—client app, partner portal, chatbot—without ever consolidating governance or documentation. Each delivery relied on a different codebase, with no reuse or process alignment.
After two years, IT teams spent 60% of their time maintaining ad hoc scripts and fixing incompatibilities, leaving little room for new developments. The overall system had become too risky to integrate new modules.
This case demonstrates that an ecosystem without organizational structures ultimately undermines the very agility it sought.
Key Steps to Structuring Sustainable Digitalization
To endure, digital transformation must be embedded in the organization through dedicated roles, end-to-end processes, and clear governance. This is what separates temporary success from sustainable digitalization.
Define Clear Ownership Roles
Establishing product owners, process owners, and data owners ensures continuous oversight of changes. These roles maintain a permanent link between business and IT, prioritize development based on business value, and arbitrate conflicts.
The product owner carries the product vision and ensures business objectives are met. The process owner maps and optimizes end-to-end workflows. The data owner secures data quality and consistency via Master Data Management (MDM) within the digital ecosystem.
Implement End-to-End Processes
Value doesn’t arise from software alone but from its integration into business processes. Defining clear, documented, and aligned process flows is essential to scale a digital initiative.
Processes should cover request governance, KPI tracking, testing cycles, and incident management. Each step is formalized, with SLAs, a steering committee, and regular reviews.
This cross-functional approach prevents silos and ensures optimal IT-business coordination, guaranteeing a consistent user journey and continuous updates.
Establish Structured Governance
Governance is the layer that makes digital transformation manageable. Without decision-making rules, prioritization becomes chaotic. With a strategic committee, an operational committee, and a validation framework, arbitration is transparent and swift.
Initiative prioritization is based on a scoring system combining business impact, operational risk, and expected costs. Committees meet regularly, ensuring constant alignment with the overall strategy.
This structure turns each project into the starting point of a continuous improvement cycle rather than an isolated phase.
Adopt a System-Oriented Model for Sustainable Digitalization
Most digital transformations are confined to project-based action peaks. To generate lasting value, roles, processes, and governance must be embedded within the organization. This way, each initiative becomes a springboard for the next, and the ecosystem continually enriches itself.
Our Edana experts help companies structure their digital operating model, avoiding vendor lock-in and favoring modular open source solutions. We tailor each architecture to the business context and implement the roles and processes that ensure coherence, ROI, and longevity.
