Almost everything written about digital transformation assumes you’re a technology company. The advice imagines an organization full of engineers, where software is the product and everyone already thinks in systems. Most companies are nothing like that, and transforming them is a different and harder job.
I ran transformation at a national retailer for two decades, a company whose business was selling things. Now I ghostwrite books for technology leaders. The non-tech transformation is the one nobody writes the real guide for.
Transformation advice that comes out of software companies and gets sold to everybody else is built for someone else. It assumes the people on the receiving end want the change, and at a retailer most of them don’t. When that advice fails, the consultants blame the workforce for being slow, and the workers who kept the business running through the whole mess end up carrying the blame for a plan that never fit them.
Most digital transformation advice assumes you’re a tech company. Most companies aren’t. Transforming a business that sells things, not software, is a completely different job.Share on X
In a technology company, improving the technology improves the product.
The two are the same thing. A better system is a better product, so investment in technology is investment in the core business, and it gets funded that way. In a retailer, technology is overhead. It supports the business, but it’s not the business. The business is the stores, the products, the customers, the experience of buying something.
Transformation advice that comes out of software companies and gets sold to everybody else is built for someone else.
That changes everything about how a transformation gets funded and prioritized. Your project is competing for money and attention against the things the company exists to do. Every dollar spent transforming a back-end system is a dollar not spent on stores or inventory or marketing or the things that visibly drive revenue. You’re always making the case for spending on something leadership sees as a cost center. That makes the translation problem even sharper.
You’re explaining what the technology does and also justifying why the company should spend on technology at all instead of on its actual business. That’s the exact challenge I describe in the boardroom and the server room speak different languages, and it’s harder in a non-tech company because the default assumption is that technology is a cost to minimize.
In a tech company, people expect their tools and systems to change constantly, because that’s the world they chose. In a retailer, the people running the warehouse or the store floor signed up to move products and serve customers. When you bring transformation to them, you’re asking people who never wanted to be technologists to change how they work, and I think they deserve a lot more respect for that than they usually get.
A refrigerated cheese packing room. The people here signed up to move product, not to learn new systems. Copyright © Richard Lowe.
That’s why the people-first approach matters even more here than it does anywhere else, the approach I lay out in people, process, technology.
The change is more foreign to these workers, the fear is more acute, and the gap between their world and the new system is wider. A warehouse worker has done the job one way for fifteen years, on paper. Now he’s being asked to trust a tablet. If you haven’t thought carefully about what that means for him, he’ll resist, and he’ll be right to.
A retailer has warehouses and trucks and shelves and physical products, and no amount of digital transformation makes any of that disappear.
Cheese wheels and wedges on carts in a cold room. Physical product that keeps moving while the systems change around it. Copyright © Richard Lowe.
You’re changing an operation that has to keep moving goods the entire time you work on it. The trucks still run, the crew still stocks the shelves, and the customers still show up. Whoever wrote a project plan that assumes the business will hold still for a weekend cutover has never had to explain an empty shelf to a store manager.
Our warehouse transformation is a good example. The warehouses generated enormous amounts of paper for manifesting, the documents that track what ships where.
One of the warehouse aisles. Every pallet on these racks used to generate paper. Copyright © Richard Lowe.
Huge printers spitting out paper, boxes and boxes of it, every single day, a physical record of a physical process. We put in tablets that captured the manifest information digitally, and we eliminated hundreds of boxes of paper from each warehouse every day.
The workers walked the floor with a tablet instead of a clipboard and a printout, capturing the same information at the source, instantly, with no printing and no boxes to store. That’s the kind of project I respect most, and it would bore a technology conference to tears. The printers went quiet, the boxes stopped piling up, and the people on the floor did the same job with less to carry and nothing to file.
We put tablets in the warehouse and eliminated hundreds of boxes of paper a day. That’s digital transformation in a company that sells things, not software.Share on X
That’s transformation in a non-tech company. Not a sleek software rollout in an office full of engineers. Tablets in a warehouse, replacing physical paper that tracked physical goods, while the goods kept moving the whole time. We did it the only way you safely can, one component at a time, the way I describe in digital transformation is plumbing, because you can’t stop the trucks to flip a switch. Less glamorous than the tech-company version, and harder, because the physical operation never pauses for your convenience.
My take
Plan for the business to keep moving the whole time. In a retailer the trucks run, the shelves get stocked, and customers show up while you change the systems underneath. Put people first even harder here, because a warehouse worker with fifteen years on paper has every reason to distrust a tablet. Go one component at a time. The project I respect most put tablets in warehouses and cut hundreds of boxes of paper a day. Nobody at a tech conference would care. The people on the floor did.
Why is transformation harder outside a tech company?
The people running the business aren’t technologists, so every change has to be translated, justified and taught before anyone will use it. Skip any one of those and the new system sits there while everybody goes back to the clipboard, and I’d blame the plan for that long before I’d blame a single worker.
From the podcast
Ben “The Automator” Christensen does the arithmetic on the smallest possible improvement, on Leaders and Their Stories:
If it saves you five minutes per day, that’s one percent of a job, of a head count. If you can do that for an entire department, you’ve probably just fixed your budget issues.Which is the version of the argument a non-technical board will approve.
If you’re transforming a company that doesn’t think of itself as technological, the standard advice will lead you wrong, yet smart leaders follow it anyway because it came from a famous software company. Fight harder for funding against the real business. Meet your people where they are, since they never chose to be technologists. And keep the trucks, the shelves and the goods in front of you the whole time, because they keep moving while you change the systems around them.
This is exactly why the transformation books I ghostwrite for leaders in real-world industries matter.
The tech-company playbook is everywhere. The accurate account of transforming a retailer, a manufacturer, a logistics operation, a company that makes or moves real things, is rare and badly needed. That’s the book that helps the next leader in a non-tech company, and it’s the kind I’m built to write, having run exactly that kind of transformation myself. You can see how I work on the technology ghostwriting page.
Frequently Asked Questions
In a technology company, better technology means a better product, so it gets funded as core investment. In a retailer or manufacturer, technology is overhead that supports the business but isn’t the business. That changes how transformation gets funded, since it competes for money against what the company exists to do and is seen as a cost center.
Because every dollar spent transforming a back-end system is a dollar not spent on the core business, like stores, inventory, or products. You’re not just explaining what the technology does, you’re justifying why the company should spend on technology at all instead of its actual business. The default assumption is that technology is a cost to minimize.
Because the people didn’t sign up to work in technology. A warehouse or store-floor worker chose to move products and serve customers, not to adapt to constantly changing systems. The change is more foreign and the fear more acute than in a tech company, so considering them first, with training and reassurance, matters even more.
It means working around physical reality that never stops. We replaced the huge volume of warehouse manifest paper with tablets that captured the information digitally at the source, eliminating hundreds of boxes of paper per warehouse each day, while goods kept physically moving the entire time. You can’t stop the trucks to transform, so you do it one component at a time.
Because the physical operation never pauses for your convenience. The trucks run, the shelves get stocked, the customers show up, all while you change the systems around them. You fight harder for funding, your people aren’t technologists by choice, and no app erases the physical goods that have to keep moving. The standard tech-company advice ignores all of this.
Yes. I transformed a national retailer and ghostwrite for leaders in real-world industries. The tech-company playbook is everywhere, but the accurate account of transforming a company that makes or moves physical things is rare and needed. You can see how I work on the technology ghostwriting page.
