Customers never notice that you have a new system. They notice that you serve them better.
The research on technology transformation carries good news. In 2024 BCG surveyed more than 1,000 C-suite executives across 59 countries about their large-scale technology programmes and profiled the champions: the 30% that fully met their timeline, budget and scope.1 90% of champions shared the same habits: clear business objectives and scope between business and IT, value cases centred on prioritised business requirements, a shared view of the target architecture, and strong vendor governance. The study also points to joint leadership from the business and technology sides, and to people capability, as major drivers of success. Prosci's benchmarking of more than 10,800 responses across 25 years has returned the same top contributor to success in every edition since 1998: active and visible executive sponsorship. With highly effective sponsors, 79% of programmes met their objectives, nearly three times the rate achieved with the least effective.2
The opportunity is clear. Technology that works is the foundation. The value comes from the business needs it serves and the people who carry it. Those elements form a virtuous circle, and three Australian programmes I was part of leading show it turning.
1. Business needs
Defence Housing Australia exists to house Defence families, close to 17,000 of them, in homes spread across the country. When its finance, procurement and management information platform came up for renewal, the conversation could easily have been about systems: which modules, what integration pattern, which cloud. The programme board, co-chaired by the CIO and the head of finance, held a better question on the table. What does a national housing business at this scale need in order to serve Defence families well?
Every design decision, rollout sequence and change activity was tested against the housing mission. That is the first habit of BCG's champions in practice: business objectives and scope, agreed between business and technology, before anything else. When business needs lead, the technology choices clarify. The question moves from "what can this system do?" to "what does the organisation need, and what is the simplest technology that delivers it?" TechnologyOne's cloud ERP made the answer possible, in service of the mission.
2. Guiding coalition
Over a single weekend, Virgin Australia merged Navitaire's New Skies on its domestic network and Amadeus on its international one together onto one Sabre platform. The airline moved from the DJ + VA flight codes to only VA to become a ticketed network carrier, whilst over 80,000 customers were in transit. The purpose was commercial: winning corporate travellers, global travel agents and alliance partners, and competing head-on with Qantas.
John Kotter's landmark study of transformation puts a powerful guiding coalition among the first steps, and says that in large companies it needs to reach twenty to fifty people.3 McKinsey's 2024 analysis of 44 transformations adds the next layer: returns turn positive once at least 7% of employees own part of the change, and a committed quarter of any group can tip the rest.4 Virgin's coalition was around fifty leaders drawn from every part of the airline. Every week they were given a closed room and an open invitation to speak candidly about the programme. The job for those of us in programme leadership was to listen, and act on what we heard. Amy Edmondson calls this psychological safety, and her 2023 review of the now-established research links it to how well teams learn, perform and lead through change.5 I won't pretend those sessions were easy: our small team of four programme leaders received brutally direct feedback. Virgin's leaders who had been heard in that room walked out and led 500 other project team members with conviction.
Desire comes first. When the leaders genuinely want the change, the five hundred behind them want it too.
3. Customer focus
For the cutover the airline put 1,000+ extra front-line staff into terminals and contact centres. It built a disruption app for the transition itself. It stood up a social media team of more than fifteen people so we could listen to and reach customers in real time. Travellers were told plainly what to expect: arrive early, carry a printed itinerary, check in online ahead of the switch. This was customer care, funded and staffed as seriously as the platform itself.
A thousand extra staff so customers felt looked after through the airline's own technology change. That is what "business first" invests — and earns.
4. Deliver value
At Suncorp and ANZ the programme was the New Payments Platform, which gave Australia payments between bank accounts around the clock, with funds available in close to real time. It was built through industry collaboration: twelve founding institutions funded it alongside the Reserve Bank, which built the settlement service.6 Suncorp's build was sponsored by the bank's CEO and drew on more than 100 technologists. The team was rebuilding its confidence after a demanding period on core banking, so building confidence became part of the delivery plan.
The first milestone was deliberately small: send a single dollar to a partner bank. Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer analysed nearly 12,000 diary entries from 238 people across seven companies and found that nothing lifts motivation through a working day more than making progress on work that matters.7 Kotter makes the delivery point: "Creating short-term wins is different from hoping for short-term wins."3 The $1, sub-10-second transfer was created. So was every capability after it, each a planned and visible win that earned the right to reach for a bigger one. Customer payments moved from days to seconds, and the programme won Suncorp's annual Shine award, chosen from across 7,000+ staff.
5. Process + people
Value is realised when people work in new ways. The BTOPP model keeps that in view by naming five dimensions of change: business strategy, technology, organisation, people and process. Virgin's systems were one part of what changed. My team also embodied our changed business strategy into new policies. We created new organisational roles. We retrained more than 4,000 people, uplifting and verifying new capabilities. We also re-engineered our passenger processes end to end. With this coordinated mix of changes, guided by our core coalition of executives, general managers, and 50 key team leaders, the airline changed with us.
This is leadership work. Robert Greenleaf's test of a servant leader was whether the people served grow.8 In delivery it means taking on the hard conversations so the team can move, and keeping the process disciplined so that care for people and rigour in delivery reinforce each other. Be soft on the people and precise on the process.
Then the circle turns again. Better processes and more capable people surface the next business need, and the organisation meets it faster, because the coalition, the customer trust and the confidence are already in place.
The technology is the enabler. The humans are the transformation. The best measure of a technology transformation is simple: your customers can tell.