When the Beast Moves
Hi, it’s been a while since my last article. No reason really, just squirrelling away and have kind of lost myself in it all. Totally normal, right?! I also wonder if it is a sign of how fulfilled you are with your role. You write less because you’re spending more of your personal time learning, exploring, and expanding your knowledge. Anyway, I’m back for however, long or short it may be. This week’s article is what I love about digital and business strategy, and how different the game is in a large multinational.
To me the business structure of a multinational firm is nothing short of a living, breathing organism. It is vast, multi-layered, interdependent, and at times, stubbornly resistant to something new. It spans regions, disciplines, client types, delivery models, and many many regulatory frameworks and policies. At any given time, one part of the business may be in capture mode, another in deep design, and yet another in long-term asset management. Then you add to that the pressures of margin targets, backlog growth, and fluctuating markets, and you’ve got a machine with hundreds of moving parts, it is an absolute beast.
But here’s the thing, when the beast moves in one direction, when its aligned, intentional, and informed, the results are nothing short of extraordinary.
This has always been the opportunity we face in digital. Not to dazzle with tech shiny toys. Not to automate for the sake of efficiency. But to strategically align digital investment with business value and with motivation to move the beast not only faster, but smarter, toward the outcomes that matter such as growth, resilience, and relevance.
Digital Has Moved Beyond the Tools
Over the years, our industry viewed digital investment through the lens of software licensing, technology upgrades, and capability building. Is that important, yes, but it is also incomplete. We’ve matured beyond the idea that digital is just about what we use. The question now is how digital contributes to what we achieve, commercially, operationally, and strategically.
In that light, aligning digital investment with business value is less about shiny dashboards and the latest generative or agentic AI and more about these three things:
- Margin impact
- Revenue acceleration, and
- Maturity uplift
We can only earn the right to scale when we tie digital activity to one (or more) of these pillars.
Margin Impact: Efficiency with Purpose
Let’s talk margin. In a professional services environment, margin isn’t just about cost-cutting it’s primarily focused on the efficient use of expertise. Every hour saved by automation, every decision accelerated by a dashboard, every risk mitigated through better information flow, contributes directly to margin preservation. But margin impact isn’t automatic. You can spend a fortune on digital platforms and still not move the needle. That’s where alignment matters.
Take the example of a project pursuit where the design team is working late into the bid phase to generate visualisations, value engineering options, and digital narratives for the client. If your digital investment has provided a content library, templated 3D assets, and AI-assisted proposal tools, you’ve just compressed the time needed, improved quality output, and created capacity. You know what, that’s margin in disguise.
The key is not just to automate what we’ve always done. It’s to ask: how can digital amplify the highest value work we do? That’s when you reach alignment. That’s impact.
Revenue Acceleration: Winning and Delivering More Work
While margin tends to dominate operational discussions, revenue sits firmly in the strategic camp, and rightly so. For a multinational business, revenue acceleration isn’t just about selling more. It’s about being ready to capture more. In a digital context, that means enabling the business to:
- Respond faster and more convincingly in bids
- Offer differentiated, digitally enabled services
- Meet client expectations for innovation, data, and integration
Digital investment should be tuned to these capabilities. When it is, my goodness it pays off.
For example, when a transport agency includes “digital twin maturity” as a bid criterion or expects AI-powered asset insights in long-term operations, the ability to speak that language, and more importantly deliver it, is a strategic advantage. That ability doesn’t come from one product or pilot. It comes from sustained, aligned investment in digital strategy, training, frameworks, and tools that directly support client value.
Do you know what one of the best indicators are that digital investment is aligned with revenue growth? It’s when the pursuit team calls the digital team before they’ve finished reading the RFP. That’s when you know you’re embedded, not bolted on.
Maturity Uplift: Building for the Business We’re Becoming
The final leg of alignment is maturity uplift. This is less about immediate ROI and more about capability. It’s where we invest in future competitiveness, in readiness for new delivery models, regulatory shifts, and AI-integrated workflows.
Maturity uplift is what keeps us from being caught flat-footed when digital becomes mandatory, not optional. It’s how we ensure we’re not just reactive to client demands but shaping them.
In a complex, federated business, digital maturity is rarely uniform. Some regions or service lines are well ahead, others may lag due to legacy constraints or different market dynamics. That’s okay, because alignment doesn’t mean symmetry. It means intention. It means knowing where and why you’re investing in maturity uplift, and ensuring leaders understand the path and the prize.
The Cost of Misalignment
Let’s be honest. It’s not always aligned. There are moments when digital initiatives run parallel to business priorities, not into them. We see this in:
- Disconnected proof-of-concepts that don’t scale
- Tools developed without operational buy-in
- Innovation efforts that can’t articulate commercial benefit
This is where digital becomes a cost centre instead of a growth engine.
Take the example of an automation tool. The tool has been built and automates some of the process and looks to be valuable to all countries. However, it requires a lot of manual effort and assistance to use the tool on every project. The greatness of the tool now gets lost in the reduced ability to scale and bad experiences from those trying to use it alone. When all it needed was alignment to the goal, and a deployment plan that suited the goal and enabled the team to deliver.
To fix areas like this, we need a discipline of portfolio management for digital initiatives, just as we would for capital investment. What are we funding? Where’s the business case? Who owns the outcomes? What will success look like in business terms, not just technical ones?
If it doesn’t link to margin, revenue, or maturity, then maybe it’s not for now.
Enablers of Alignment
So, what is it that actually helps a multinational “beast” move in a single digital direction? Here are five enablers I’ve found important from the past 25+ years:
- Clear Cascading Strategy
Digital strategy must be framed from enterprise goals down to business unit outcomes. If the company goal is margin expansion, the digital portfolio should reflect that. If the region needs to win more government work, digital investment must support capture. The great part about the cascading strategy is when it reaches right into the performance goals of all individuals, that’s when you know you’ve made the change sustainable.
- Governance with Teeth
Investments need transparent governance, not just steering or working groups, but decision frameworks that include commercial metrics, inter-disciplinary oversight, and the ability to stop what’s not working. I’ve watched many businesses keep things moving because they were worried about how much they had invested in the wrong solution and how bad it would look for the team. The governance board holds the accountability with the team. They decide on the risk level, and they determine the guardrails.
- Cross-functional Sponsorship
Digital should never be “owned” by IT or any single function. True alignment means co-ownership between IT, digital, operations, finance, BD, and client leads. That’s how you gain traction as the buy-in is across so many facets of the business. This is my favourite enabler. I love cross-functional teams, it’s like working with the best of the best. Everything always seems to be delivered incredibly quickly, and the robust working environment moves from concept to functional product in a streamlined and succinct manner.
- Evidence of Impact
Build the habit of reporting impact in commercial terms. How many hours saved? How much faster did we deliver? Did we win because of digital capability? Did we retain because of it? The more we measure, the more we can move. Movement is the key. Digital will always have a greater emphasis on performance compared to anything else in a business.
- Cultural Confidence
This is probably the most important of them all, not that I’m biased, but digital leaders must carry the confidence to speak in business terms and not technical ones. It’s our job to bridge the gap, not deepen it. Commercial acumen is not optional for digital professionals anymore, it’s absolutely foundational.
When the Beast Moves
I’ve seen it firsthand. A multinational business aligning its digital roadmap to revenue growth. A project team reshaping their pursuit strategy with digital at the centre. A boardroom conversation shifting from “what does it cost” to “what does it unlock.” These aren’t isolated moments. They’re signals of maturity. Signals that digital has earned its seat at the table, not because it’s cool, but because it’s commercially smart.
When the beast moves, aligned and intentional, it doesn’t just look impressive. It is impressive. It’s competitive. It’s resilient. And most of all, it’s future-fit.
Final Thought
Digital investment is not about buying the latest tech. It’s about enabling the business we want to become. When we align digital with business value, not just operational need, we turn digital from a toolset into a growth strategy. We move faster. We win more and we build smarter, more connected futures, for our clients, our people, and our industry.
Let’s keep the beast moving.