In conversations with people here at AWS re:Invent this week, I was asking what people thought was the number one roadblock that keeps organizations from engaging with digital transformation. Aligned with my own experience, the answer is uniformly the same: prioritizing.
Most companies don’t struggle because of a lack of ideas, talent, or available technologies. They struggle because everything feels important, and no one wants to be the person who says not now.
Digital transformation requires a series of deliberate trade-offs:
What gets done first? What gets postponed? What gets eliminated entirely?
Without a clear priority framework, organizations default to reacting: support tickets, urgent requests, political noise, while the initiatives that actually move the company forward sit in backlog limbo.
The irony is that transformation is not blocked by technology at all. It is blocked by decision-making.
And this includes the political layer. Politics does move the company forward because that is where decisions happen. Priorities are shaped by influence, relationships, budgets, and internal narratives just as much as they are by technical logic. The mistake is believing politics and technology operate independently. They do not. They are intertwined.
In healthy organizations, the political engine and the technical engine point in the same direction. Leadership understands the value of modernization and commits to it. Technical teams communicate in business terms and tie their roadmap to outcomes leadership cares about. When these forces align, decisions become clearer, priorities stabilize, and transformation accelerates.
A perfect real-world example of this alignment came from Hyundai. I had the pleasure of attending Sunwoo Kim’s presentation, Head of the Solution Division at Hyundai AutoEver, on how the company is partnering with AWS to modernize Hyundai’s global ERP landscape. They are migrating more than 30 on-premises SAP ECC environments to the cloud, consolidating them, and providing centralized visibility and management across regions. After the session, I asked Mr. Kim about the challenges behind digital transformation. His answer reflected exactly this idea of alignment: leadership supported the initiative, internal teams were united behind the mission, and prioritization came naturally. What remained was the how, and his approach was clear and methodical:
- Take inventory of processes
- Create a unified framework that serves all business needs
- Create a plan and architect the solution
- Tackle the most challenging work first
The teams that do succeed share one behavior in common: they ruthlessly sequence their work. They align around a small number of high-impact goals, commit to them, and protect them. Once that discipline is in place, progress accelerates: modernization, automation, AI adoption, all of it.
What are your company’s biggest roadblocks to modernization?
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