By Lisa Woodall
For decades, established IT practices have given us order, reliability, and professionalisation. They stabilised operations, defined accountability, and allowed technology to scale. But the business world has not stood still. We’ve moved through different eras of “digital,” each with distinct demands.
The question is whether our practices have kept up or whether we’re dragging yesterday’s methods into tomorrow’s realities.
A Taxonomy of Digital
To understand the challenge, I find, it helps to break digital down into three eras, three value models and review practice strategies, and goals. And look at the challenge from the different perspectives.
1. Three Eras of Digital
I see three digital eras; two have recognisable labels, the last one I’ve taken a stab at labelling. And I feel the eras form part of the practice challenge.
- Digitise (operations) Making the machine more efficient. ERP rollouts, process automation, cost reduction.
- Digital (offerings) Creating new customer-facing value. Apps, platforms, new services that differentiate.
- Digital Intelligence Leveraging AI, data, and adaptive platforms for augmentation, personalisation, and scale.
Each era is real, each matters but each demanded and continues to demand something different from our methods and mindsets.
2. Three Business Value Models
Then the core drivers of many businesses;
- Sustain Keep what exists reliable, efficient, and cost-effective.
- Grow Extend into new markets, expand adoption, scale customer reach.
- Innovate Create new products, services, and entirely new business models.
These models are not optional choices; most organisations must pursue all three at once. The question is balance.
Where IT Practices Sit Today
Then looking at the world of the IT practices that we follow. Are we looking for them to :-
- Bottom-up evolution Incrementally adapt existing practices to new needs.
- Redesign for layers Creating different practices for different contexts:
- Core (utility, warranty)
- Extended (sustainability, adaptability)
- Inventive (adoption, experience).
Are we looking for practices to stretch their foundations or is it better to apply different practices for different drivers of the business? And then, somehow find a way to integrate them.
I then start to question if IT practices have organised themselves around two core aspects to enable the businesses they serve?
- Operational Assurance utility, warranty, sustainability.
- Exploratory Impact adaptability, adoption, experience.
And then if I take a look at the established IT practices I appreciate they were born in the digitise/sustain era like many of our core legacy systems. Their purpose was clear: keep the machine running. And they did it well.
- Core practices incident management, change control, continuity.
- Goals delivered utility, warranty, sustainability.
When outsourcing and cloud reshaped IT into provider–consumer models, these practices evolved bottom-up. Service catalogues, SLAs, and supply chain orchestration were added. This was progress, but it was still anchored in sustain.
The trouble came when organisations tried to stretch these same practices into digital/grow and even digital/innovatespaces. Here the goals shift: adoption and experience matter more than efficiency and warranty. Established practices weren’t designed for that. They talked about “value,” but in operational terms. Teams chasing new offerings often found the frameworks a brake, not an accelerator.
The Collision Problem
The framework and practices started to collide. I wonder if this is where the taxonomy may help us see the collision more clearly.
- Digitise + Sustain Core practices fit perfectly. Reliability, accountability, and control are the right answers.
- Digital + Grow Suddenly, adoption and experience matter. Extended practices need to focus on adaptability, co-creation, and customer outcomes. Established methods struggle here.
- Digital + Innovate Inventive practices are essential. You need discovery workshops, prototypes, fast pivots. Here, the operational DNA of old practices collides most sharply with the exploratory DNA of new ones.
And now, before many organisations have mastered digital/grow, we are moving into digital intelligence. That raises the stakes further: adaptability, experience, and augmentation at scale.
The reality is that practices optimised for stability inevitably collide with the needs of growth and innovation. One demands control, the other thrives on experimentation.
What to Do About It
So what’s the answer? There are two paths, and most organisations need both.
- Evolve bottom-up for the core
- Keep improving established practices to strengthen the backbone.
- Focus them on utility, warranty, sustainability.
- Accept that their natural home is digitise/sustain.
- Redesign for the layers beyond the core
- Create extended practices that support adaptability and growth.
- Build inventive practices explicitly designed for adoption and experience.
- Position them alongside, not underneath, the core.
The point is balance. Don’t ask core practices to do what inventive ones must. Don’t confuse sustaining with innovating.
A Provocative Reflection
The provocation is this: can practices that evolve slowly ever catch up with eras that move faster? Or are we destined to live in a two-speed world where operational assurance and exploratory impact never fully reconcile?
If digitise defined one generation, digital another, and intelligence is defining the next, then maybe it’s time to ask not just whether our practices keep up, but whether they can compliment one another and integrate well to get results.
From digitising operations to digital offerings to digital intelligence, the pace of change has accelerated. But the development of our practices and the integration of them could be lagging.
They do not integrate well and they lag. They have accumulated practice debt, maybe. They stabilise based on experiences of the past while the future races ahead.
The challenge is not to discard them, but to rebalance them. Use them where they belong, at the core, sustaining performance and consider how to progressively connect them into contexts they now need to serve. Build and connect practices for the inventive edge, where adoption, experience, and adaptability matter most. The key word here could be “connect”.
There is an uncomfortable question that is now niggling me.
If established practices defined the age of digitising operations, what will define the age of digital intelligence and are we brave enough to address this? are we ready to redraw the IT practice architecture and connect a catalogue of complimentary rather than competing practices that are fit for the different layers of the digital era we now find ourselves in?
About the Author
Lisa Woodall is a business transformation leader, enterprise architect, and author of Whatever Next? Making transformation more human, more honest, and more likely to stick. Drawing on decades of lived experience, she writes about the realities of transformation through the lenses of reflection, imagination, reframing, rewiring, and reconnecting.