DIGITAL meets INDUSTRIAL

I find senior leaders have no idea where to start with digital transformation. So what happens?

Someone in safety says incident reporting is a nightmare. Someone in operations wants digital checklists. Maintenance has been asking for a mobile work order system for three years. Quality needs better traceability.

All reasonable problems. All worth solving.

So you solve them. One at a time. Different teams, different vendors, different timelines. Two years later, you’ve got four systems that don’t talk to each other and nobody connecting the dots.

The Kingdom Problem

This is how most operations approach digitalization. Not as a strategy, but as a collection of pain points that get funded when the pain gets loud enough. Or by a leader that has the wrong motivations and wants to build their own kingdom and grab headlines.

Your safety VP gets budget for an incident reporting app. Great. Your operations Director gets digital checklists. Also great. Your maintenance supervisor finally gets that mobile CMMS module. Fantastic.

Except now front line workers are using three different tools during their shift. And none of the data between the tools connect – so those promises made to improve the front-line experience, and deliver on efficiencies, never come to fruition.

The Real Cost Isn’t the Software

The promise of digitalization is that it collapses admin work. You report something once, it flows through. You complete a checklist, the data automatically populates your compliance reports. An operator flags an issue, it creates a work order, links to the equipment history, and notifies the right people.

But that only works if someone is thinking about the whole picture.

Instead, we’re asking people to be the integration layer. Your supervisor is manually pulling data from four systems to create one report. Your operators are entering the same information multiple times. Your maintenance planners are copying and pasting between systems.

We’ve digitized the work without reducing the work. Sometimes we’ve made it worse.

What’s Missing

Someone needs to own the connected worker strategy. Not just the technology strategy – the actual experience of how your workforce interacts with all these systems.

When you’re evaluating that next digital initiative, someone should be asking: How does this fit with what we already have? Where’s the overlap? Are we asking people to enter the same data twice? What process is this tool supporting? What’s the motivation behind this initiative? Because if it’s kingdom building… then that ain’t it.

This isn’t about buying one vendor’s ecosystem for everything. It’s about having an actual strategy for how these pieces connect. What’s the common data model? How do systems talk to each other?

Start with the Workflow, Not the Tools

This is the only effective way that’s worked in my experience: Map out an actual workflow your people do today. Pick something that crosses departments—say, responding to an equipment issue.

Watch how it actually happens. Who enters what, where? How many times does the same information get recorded? Where do handoffs break down? What gets lost in translation?

Then ask: If we were designing this workflow from scratch with digital tools, what would it look like? Not “what tools do we buy,” but “what does the person doing the work need at each step?”

Spending time doing up-front strategy by mapping process saves a ton of time and money in the long run. And instead of a bunch of projects done in silos, you have a strategy that’s organized and prioritized.

Stop Adding to the Junk Drawer and Own the Strategy (For The Right Reasons)

Digital transformation without strategy is just expensive chaos. You end up with a drawer full of tools that don’t fit together, and a workforce that’s more frustrated than before.

Before you fund the next digital initiative, ask yourself: Who’s making sure this connects to everything else? Who’s thinking about the operator logging into their fourth system of the day? Who’s responsible for the actual experience of being a connected worker at your site?

If the answer is nobody, you’re just building another pet project. And your junk drawer is getting full.