This year enterprises are expected to invest $1.3 trillion (USD) in digital transformation initiatives to apply digital capabilities to improve efficiencies, increase customer value and create new monetization opportunities. Tragically, research tells us that 70% of these initiatives will not reach their stated goals. That equates to over $900 billion worth of spend that will miss the mark. This is mismanagement on a colossal scale.

Why does this happen? I believe there are two core problems.

1. Teamwork is forgotten in business transformations.

Transformation success is completely dependent on employees working together to achieve the program’s goals. The whole company, not just a few people on the same team, must unite to drive success. Unfortunately, most organizations are siloed, with functional areas and business units struggling to communicate, coordinate and collaborate in relation to transformation initiatives.

It gets worse. The diverse tools, data repositories and workflows across disparate functions exacerbate enterprise disorganization, resulting in a work ecosystem that is largely analog and siloed. Hence, a relatively small portion of a knowledge worker’s time — 39% according to our study — is dedicated to their primary job duties. Too much of the workday is swallowed up by email, administrative tasks and meetings. Substantial time is lost in the frustrating “shadow work” of trying to navigate the seams within and across silos while doing cross-team work.

2. There is no system of record for work.

All enterprises have systems of record for critical functions. SAP and NetSuite provide financial systems of record. Salesforce provides a customer (or sales) system of record. There are systems of record for other functions as well, such as IT and HR. However, ask any executive what their organization is working on at the moment and they’ll struggle to tell you the what, who and how much of a significant amount of corporate investment (i.e., their initiatives tied to digital transformation). Enterprises lack an operational system of record that acts as the authoritative source of truth for the organization’s work investments, progress and results.

This siloed, inefficient, late-20th-century approach of tracking work across thousands of spreadsheets, emails and point solutions is common across organizations of all sizes and industries. The problems with this approach are numerous, chief among them that centralized reporting on critical initiatives is impossible. This means course corrections cannot be applied to in-flight work in real time because there is no visibility. The result? The organization’s financial performance for the fiscal year is a lagging indicator instead of an actively managed outcome.