When it comes to digital transformation, progress is still a steep climb for many. Recent studies show that 88% of transformation fall short of their ambitions while only a quarter of organizations qualify their efforts as truly successful. [1]
But after decades of investment, why is real impact still so rare? The answer lies in a persistent gap between strategy and execution. McKinsey research indicates that even high-performing companies deliver around 30% less value than their strategies promise. [2]
When there's a disconnect between strategy and execution, it often stems from lacking a unified view of the organization, leading to fragmented decisions and lost value.
Bizzdesign, a leading enterprise transformation SaaS company, today announced that it has been named a Leader in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Enterprise Architecture Tools. This is the eighteenth consecutive year that Bizzdesign has been placed in the Leaders quadrant.
About Bizzdesign
Bizzdesign is a global enterprise transformation SaaS company. Through the merger of three industry leaders, Bizzdesign, MEGA International, and Alfabet, the company offers a comprehensive enterprise transformation suite that helps organizations navigate the complexity of digital business. With a data-driven and AI-powered approach, it accelerates transformation, from vision to value, by empowering teams to collaboratively plan, design, and govern change.
It’s no good having a strategy if you can’t execute on it.
This year, for our fifth annual State of Enterprise Architecture report, we quizzed organizations on their ability to bring about change. In particular, we focused on how well they understand their capabilities and their insight into IT sustainability. We also asked about how they invest, and what the barriers to executing strategy are.
Respondents assessed their enterprise architecture maturity on seven criteria. We then worked out an average score and ranked the results. The top 25% of organizations we named “leaders”, and the bottom 25% are “laggards”. More than 500 enterprise architecture professionals and their colleagues took part.
We found that leaders invest more strategically, have a better understanding of their capabilities, and are way ahead in IT sustainability.
To successfully transform an organization requires a good understanding of its capabilities today and how they need to change in the future. Capabilities are things that the organization does or can do, regardless of how they’re done. For example, “product development” might be a high-level capability, while “prototyping” might be a capability under it. The idea is that the entire organization can be described in terms of its capabilities, without overlaps or gaps.
Most CEOs aren’t short on ambition. What they lack is visibility. Strategic plans stall, investments go unchecked, and disconnected teams spin in circles—all because leaders can’t see where value is being created (or lost). Strategic Portfolio Management changes that. It turns transformation from a guessing game into a guided and collaborative path for decision makers.
Today’s CEOs are under relentless pressure to deliver transformation with precision. For CIOs, that means finding ways to prioritize investments, accelerate delivery, manage costs, and allocate resources more effectively. SPM is becoming central to that effort, and according to Gartner’s Technology Adoption Roadmap for Large Enterprises 2025 survey, the number of SPM frameworks, processes, and tools in use has nearly doubled in the past year – rising from 17% to 32%.
Digital transformation has become synonymous with progress. Every new platform promises agility, every integration the potential to scale, and every cloud migration a faster path to innovation. But beneath the surface of this rapid evolution lies a growing problem.
What started as a push to modernize has evolved into a tangled web of systems, processes, and tools. Enterprises are now navigating sprawling application portfolios, fragmented data ecosystems, and multi-cloud infrastructures, all while trying to stay responsive to market demands. Then throw another variable in the mix: AI.
Not long ago, digital transformation was seen as a long-term strategic goal. Today, it’s a high-stakes sprint, with unprecedented urgency. In a world where AI reshapes industries monthly and macroeconomic volatility rewrites priorities overnight, the companies that survive — let alone lead — are those that can adapt faster than their competitors.
Businesses are under immense pressure to evolve, and fast. Global economic uncertainty, supply chain disruptions, and the rapid emergence of generative AI have fundamentally changed the rules of the game. Boardrooms now demand measurable transformation outcomes not in years, but in quarters. Meanwhile, teams are expected to multiply productivity with the same – or lower – headcount.
This isn’t theoretical. Many boards are now targeting 10x acceleration from strategy to results. But while ambition soars, execution often falls flat.
Organizations of all sizes and industries face an increasingly complex and rapidly changing business environment that may hinder successful business transformation. The leading innovation author and speaker Peter Hinssen calls it the “Never Normal” – a world with more frequent ‘seismic shocks’ of technology innovation, geopolitical conflicts, and ecological challenges affecting the very fundamentals of business, and the ‘polycrises’ when multiple catastrophic events occur together.
This new reality presents a wickedly complex challenge for business leaders to understand and respond more quickly to this mix of threats and opportunities while simultaneously transforming their organizations to achieve business goals.
Organizations must embrace the uncertainty of not knowing what will happen next and methods that enable them to navigate this complexity early enough, or they risk going the way of Kodak, Blockbuster, and Nokia.
