Every workstream is green. Who owns the digital transformation?

Digital transformation cuts across technology, people, customers and suppliers, often with different owners, reporting lines and KPIs. Everyone’s individual slice can look green while no one owns whether the whole thing is actually delivered.

If your governance structure mirrors the org chart rather than the outcome, you’re not really governing the transformation. You’re governing the silos that are quietly working against it.

That accountability gap is one of the things I want to get into at the closing panel at the IoD Leadership Conference, where we’ll be asking: How do we REALLY govern digital transformation? 

I think there is a widening gap between the way boards currently govern transformation and what the work demands.

Most governance models assume you can approve a plan, track it against milestones and arrive at a defined end state. Digital transformation doesn’t behave that way and, increasingly, neither does the business environment around it.

It’s less a bridge you build once and more a garden that needs constant tending, in weather that changes faster than most boards meet. If our governance frameworks were designed for certainty and sequence, and the thing we’re governing is neither certain nor sequential, it’s worth asking whether we’re applying the right model at all, rather than just applying the old one more diligently.

Look beyond the technology 

Most board oversight energy still goes towards the technology itself – the vendor, the architecture, the shiny bits – when the technology is arguably the least risky part of the whole exercise.

What determines success or failure is people, process and the redistribution of power that “transformation” is often a polite word for.

If your board committee spends more time interrogating the tech stack than the change management plan, that’s not thoroughness – that’s looking for your keys under the streetlight because the light’s better there.

So, what should directors be asking before signing off on the next major digital spend?

• • What specific business problem does this solve, and how will we know if it hasn’t worked?
  • Who owns that outcome, not who owns the project? There’s always a willing sponsor for the project and rarely anyone whose job depends on the business result actually showing up.
  • What should make a director nervous? 

A business case built entirely on cost-out with no credible customer or revenue upside. A vendor effectively writing their own business case. An irreversible go-live dressed up as inevitable.

And, perhaps most usefully, too much confidence in the room.

Anyone giving you a crisp, assured answer on AI capability or timelines right now either doesn’t fully understand the problem or is managing you.

Where does accountability go to die?

Boards can make fragmented accountability worse by accepting papers structured to match it – an IT update here, a change update there, never in conversation with each other.

AI sharpens all of this and I’d argue it forces a genuine rethink rather than a minor adjustment.

It moves faster than the monthly or quarterly cycle most boards still operate on, which raises a real question about whether our current model of governance is fit for purpose for anything AI touches, not just whether boards need better reporting between meetings.

It introduces risk that most existing risk frameworks simply weren’t built to handle.

And a significant amount of what’s being sold right now as “AI transformation” is a chatbot bolted onto a broken process, which doesn’t fix anything. It just executes the existing failure faster and with more unearned confidence.

What does governance need to become?

If the pace, uncertainty and risk profile of digital and AI-driven change has genuinely outstripped the governance model most boards still use, tweaking the model isn’t going to be enough.

At some point we have to ask what governance itself needs to become, not just what directors need to ask differently within the model we’ve already got.

That’s the conversation I want us to have at the conference. I don’t think it’s one many boardrooms have had honestly, yet.

Ben Kepes CFInstD is a professional chair, director, entrepreneur and technology commentator with deep experience in digital transformation, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and technology strategy. He chairs Kordia Group and SmartCo, is Deputy Chair of Unimed, and serves on a range of other boards across healthcare, infrastructure, technology and iwi organisations.

The IoD’s National Leadership Conference brings together more than 500 directors and business leaders for two days of governance discussion and networking on 3–4 September at the Tākina Convention and Events Centre in Wellington.  Local and international speakers will discuss governance and leadership issues affecting Aotearoa New Zealand and the wider world.  Register here.