I’ve heard this exact sentence twice recently—once from a property developer and once from a large property management firm.

Both had invested heavily. They hired an IT company, rented cloud licenses, and had fancy apps developed. The bitter result after the rollout? Nobody uses it.

• Employees were never trained, and processes were never adapted to the new tools.
• Customers knew nothing about it because the marketing was missing.
• The absolute low point: Their own service staff actively advised against the new digital products on the phone because they weren’t convinced themselves.

How could it come to this?

The root of the problem was a complete lack of communication structure with the service provider: One company blindly gave the IT firm free rein (“Just make us digital”). At the other, management simply didn’t know what would make their own team’s daily work easier or what the end customer actually needed.

Many companies believe they can simply buy “digitalization” as an off-the-shelf package. But superimposing software over unclear or broken processes doesn’t solve problems. It just makes them more expensive.

It is not enough to hand an agency a budget and hope that value creation drops out at the end. What was massively missing here was the strategic framework: the translation between business requirements and the IT service provider.

This is exactly where my mandate as an Enterprise Architect comes in. It is not about blindly producing code. It is about steering the business, processes, and service providers in a way that the final solution saves (or generates) money—and is actually used by the people.

Technology is just the lever. The structure must be in place first.

Who else has witnessed expensive IT projects end up as “data graveyards” because the bridge between the business department and IT was missing? 👇

#Digitalization #PropTech #EnterpriseArchitecture #ITConsulting #ChangeManagement #Restatify #ITStrategy