Absolutely: So shifting the work and therefore the cost to the customer, which the customer sees as a lower-cost solution.

I am not sure that ANY company runs without paper or manual procedures. That is only in the dreams of BPM vendors. Even is a digital that are huge areas of the business which cannot be digitized.

You have dedicated sales people, right? Right?!

Max, the recursive nature of your definition pretty much kills it - if a company goes digital when most of its customers have gone digital, this means those customers cannot be companies (because that would require their customers' in turn to have gone digital and so on...).
so your definition would apply to B2C companies only? has any consumer market (except audience) gone almost fully digital? hmm...

Any corrections of my English are very welcome.

Was it English?

"International English", of course

;-)

I think the term to be defined shouldn't be part of the definition itself. In that case the adjective "digital".

@Kay, yes, this my mistake. Definition of "digital" as adjective requires more homework. Thanks.

You know your primary artefacts, you know processes in life cycles of these artefacts and you know how many of those processes use a digital presentation of those artefacts as the master repository. What's wrong with this calculations ?

+1 new word for me:"felderkarb"

@samarin, leaving aside the fact for the moment that the majority of the industry (particularly the vendors and large integrators, not to mention a certain large industry analyst) have come remotely near the precision of that definition. It would now appear, by your definition, we have measurements for "digital representation of artefacts' life cycle processes" to quantify 'digital transformation.' I can live with, am good with that definition, but how many instances can you cite, know of where the analytics for either the processes themselves, or the artefacts, or both are tracked in that manner, to such a level of granularity? And, further, for what purpose(s)? If we go by your definition and have consensus for that, then NOBODY I'm aware of right now is out there doing this. It hearkens back, is analogous to, old process automation projects', initiatives' felderkarb (John Morris, see "Battlestar Galactica").

Your definition, I'm afraid, is flying at a much lower altitude, much closer to the bare metal, than the overall industry discussions using this term and I'm even more dubious of any project(s) out there exercising the above definition, including going back to the conversation that promulgated this one.

There's something very relevant, salient to say about metrics here - or the omission thereof - I just haven't figured it out yet.

@Patrick (@pelujan), thanks for your feedback. Is seems we agreed that the proposed measure is objective. Fortunately, it can be applied at the design time and not at run time as you mentioned. Thus a good enough governance is good enough.
RE "old process automation projects" sure. My definition is about life cycle - just using digital presentation of your organisation primary artefacts is not enough - your organisation life cycles must be reconsidered to achieve your business goals. Example: One of my specialities since 1980 is electronic publishing and I participated in “digital transformation” of the International Standards production. The main business goals were uniformity (easier to understand), correctness (those documents are legal documents) and time-to-market (not 5 years). Our initial “digitalisation” of this production was pure automation of the paper-based life-cycle of standards – linear sequence of receiving a draft, technical editing, preparing drawing, proof-reading, QA, repeating and publishing. People worked with an electronic document in the same way as they worked with the paper one – just moving a folder from one post to another.
Of course, time-to-market was difficult to reduce. But, at one moment, the business understood that a few traditionally linear steps can be carried out in parallel, e.g. drawing and some proofreading. Thus, we had an immediate reduction in time-to-market.
Next, we understood, that all our production activities may be intermixed with the up-front drafting if the latter is carried out online, by small fragments and incrementally (something à la Wikipedia). Again, the time-to-market has been reduced and uniformity and correctness improved. Although it sounds like “good” old BPR, such a transformation was enabled by the digital presentation of artefacts including business processes.
RE “the bare metal,” – excellent analogy although I would prefer “bare architecture”. Yes, chemistry, to win against alchemy (which spanning some four millennia and three continents), had to go very deep to “bare molecules”. The modern “copy” of alchemy, known as digital hype, is waiting for its chemistry.

I tend to agree with that.

Also an interesting take on it. The intriguing point you raise, related but not necessarily to a degree of causality, is the influence of hype cycles on driving demand in the world of IT. From there one could investigate the stream (monetary?) of interest groups and/or vendors to analysts, their leverage and impacts on the market, using different tools that end up setting trends and creating demand.

Sure, they are "doing their jobs", except that in most organizations one is line, the other staff.

Accordingly, the job of the technology leader (except in businesses where the business is technology) is to sell/support "digitization" initiatives to business leaders who then prepare ROIs that detail costs/timing and risks.

A good ROI will filter out hype.

There are two types of ROIs - ones that get submitted, receive funding and the stakeholders then all "move on". The other, where the architects of the ROI get to "boil in their own puddings", tend to have less fails.

It seems impractical for organizations to take on initiatives that have such a high predicted rate of failure.

What this tells us is the folks preparing ROIs for "digitization' initiative funding are not doing a very good job highlighting risks in these ROIs..

If they were to include the range of risks, few of the ROIs would get approved.

Agree the implementation of transformation should be small steps involving users working in small groups achieving a specific outcome. This is the tactical implementation of the larger strategic transformation plan and will work if the leaders truly understand this otherwise costly failure likely....?

RE "Large transformations fail because they're large. People choke on them." - not surprising because the cited article from Forbes does not mention the word "architecture" at all.

+1 "Pharaonic"!