A lot of transformation programs describe themselves as business-led.
That is usually a good starting point.
The problem is that, in practice, “business-led” can quickly become business and technology led. The organisation defines what it needs, technology determines what is possible, and customers and employees are brought in later to validate what has already been decided.
That is not really transformation.
It is often digitisation of an existing operating model.
A better model is to be business and user led, and technology enabled.
The distinction sounds small, but it changes how you approach almost every decision.
Business needs are only part of the picture
Every organisation has legitimate business needs.
It needs to reduce cost, manage risk, meet regulatory obligations, increase productivity, improve data quality and operate more efficiently.
In government, those requirements can be even more pronounced. Services need to comply with legislation, manage public money appropriately, protect personal information and support complex regulatory processes.
But an organisation can meet all those internal requirements and still deliver poor service.
Customers do not experience organisational structures, operating models or technology platforms.
They experience a service.
They experience the questions they are asked, the information they have to provide, how easily they can complete something, whether they understand what happens next, and whether the organisation already appears to know something they have provided before.
Staff experience the same service from another side.
They experience duplicate data entry, workarounds, unnecessary handoffs, manual checks, and systems that force them to compensate for gaps in the process.
If transformation considers only the business and the technology, those problems can persist almost untouched.
They simply move onto a newer platform.
Start with the service, not the system
One of the most important lessons from my work has been to resist starting with screens, features or platform capabilities.
Start with the service.
What is the person trying to achieve?
What does the organisation need to achieve?
What information is genuinely required?
Where does risk need to be managed?
What creates unnecessary effort?
What can be reused?
What could disappear entirely?
Only then should technology become part of the conversation.
I saw this clearly while leading service design work across a transport regulators multi year transformation program.
The program involved moving complex regulatory services into a more unified Salesforce environment. It would have been relatively easy to begin with the platform and ask how existing processes could be configured within it.
Instead, much of the important work happened before that.
We looked at complete journeys across applications, identity, eligibility, evidence, payments, assessment, case management, compliance, communications and ongoing monitoring.
That exposed something a system view alone cannot: many of the biggest opportunities sit between systems, teams and process steps.
The question then changes from:
“How do we build this in Salesforce?”
to:
“What should this service actually look like, and where can technology make it simpler?”
That is a much more valuable question about transformation.
User-led does not mean ignoring the business
There can sometimes be a false tension between customer-centred design and business outcomes.
I don’t see them as competing objectives.
Some of the strongest design work I have been involved in has created value precisely because it solved both.
At an organisation I worked with, we shifted the focus of digital improvement away from simply redesigning pages and towards understanding how people were actually trying to complete high-volume services.
Customer research, behavioural data and failure-demand analysis helped identify where customers were struggling and where people were being pushed into assisted channels.
That led to changes in service structure, content, navigation and digital journeys.
Task success increased from 65% to 81%.
For one service, digital completion increased from 26% to 36%, representing more than 23,000 additional transactions each year moving through the digital channel.
That is both a customer outcome and a business outcome.
The user gets a service that is easier to complete.
The organisation reduces avoidable effort and cost.
Technology enables the improvement, but it is not what identifies the problem.
Sometimes the biggest opportunity isn’t digital at all
The same principle applies to another government program: supporting local councils in their business approval processes.
The problem was not simply that councils needed a better digital application form.
Small businesses trying to open or expand could face multiple permits, different council departments, unclear requirements and long approval processes.
Looking at the problem from the user’s perspective exposed the real issue: the service was fragmented around the organisation rather than designed around the person trying to navigate it.
The response therefore had to involve process redesign, clearer ownership, coordination and service simplification as well as digital support.
The result was a 72% reduction in permit-approval processing time among participating councils, with significant savings for small businesses.
Again, technology played a role.
But technology was not the strategy.
The strategy was to remove unnecessary complexity from the service.
Technology should expand the solution space
Being technology enabled does not mean treating technology as an afterthought.
Quite the opposite.
Product, architecture and engineering expertise should be involved early.
Modern platforms, automation, APIs, digital identity, data sharing and AI can radically change what a service is capable of doing.
The difference is in the role technology plays.
Technology should help us ask:
“What is now possible that wasn’t possible before?”
rather than:
“How can we make the service fit the platform we’ve selected?”
That distinction becomes particularly important with configurable enterprise platforms.
Configuration is valuable. Standardisation is valuable. Reusable components are valuable.
But “the platform can do it” is not, by itself, a reason to design a service a particular way.
Equally, every user need does not justify custom technology.
Good transformation sits between those extremes.
It understands the needs of the business and its users, understands the possibilities and constraints of the technology, and then deliberately designs the best trade-off.
Design across three perspectives
I increasingly think of successful transformation as the intersection of three perspectives:
Business
What outcomes does the organisation need to achieve?
People
What do customers, employees and other participants need to successfully interact with the service?
Technology
What capabilities can enable those outcomes sustainably, securely and at scale?
The first two should define the problem.
The third should help unlock the solution.
When technology starts defining the problem, organisations risk solving what the platform is good at rather than what actually needs fixing.
When business requirements alone define the service, organisations risk optimising internally while simply transferring effort to customers or frontline staff.
Bringing all three together creates something different.
It creates services that work for the organisation because they work better for the people using and delivering them.
Transformation should change the service
The most successful transformation programs I have seen do not begin with a predetermined list of features.
They begin with outcomes.
They understand the current service.
They involve the people who deliver and use it.
They challenge inherited assumptions.
They simplify before they automate.
They reuse where it makes sense.
And then they use technology aggressively where it can genuinely improve the service.
That is why I prefer the idea of being business and user led, and technology enabled.
Technology is extraordinarily important.
But the objective of transformation is not to implement technology.
It is to create a better-performing organisation and a better service.
Technology is one of the most powerful tools we have to make that happen.