TRANSFORM!
The 14 Behaviors Driving Successful Digital Transformation in the Age of Gen AI
Transform! is your essential guide to navigating and leading technology-driven change in today’s fast-moving world. This book is for anyone grappling with the realities of tech-led transformation – from overwhelmed executives to hands-on technologists. Blending compelling real-world stories with practical insights, Transform! reveals why so many large-scale change efforts fail – and what it takes to make them succeed. It’s part storytelling, part field manual, and fully focused on the human, cultural, and systemic challenges of transformation.
The authors don’t shy away from the tough stuff: legacy systems, broken org structures and misaligned incentives. They show how emerging tools like Generative AI fit into the picture, without the hype. Transform! is ultimately about building the mindset and muscle needed to deliver better outcomes, together – for your organization, your users, and society at large.
What motivated us to write Transform!?
We wrote Transform! because after decades in technology, we’ve seen the same mistakes made over and over — mistakes that waste money, waste human talent, and sometimes even cost lives.
For one of us, it came from a desire to share forty years of experience — to help people and organizations avoid the failures we’ve witnessed firsthand. When technology goes wrong at scale, as we saw in cases like the Post Office or Boeing, the consequences aren’t abstract. They affect real people. So, part of the motivation was deeply personal: to improve outcomes, even to help prevent harm.
For another, it began as a rant that turned into a mission — frustration with the complacency and waste that still surround digital transformation. We know how to do this well. There are proven methods, agile principles, and examples of excellence out there — and yet, boards and senior leaders still turn away, treating transformation as an IT problem rather than a strategic responsibility. That negligence, frankly, should make people angry.
And the third motivation was to bridge perspectives — to connect the consulting and engineering view with the experience of line managers, executives, and consumers who live with the results. We wanted to reach a non-technical audience — to help them understand why systems fail, why flights get delayed, why retailers lose millions to hacks — and what cultural and leadership changes could stop it from happening again.
Ultimately, we wrote Transform! because technology now touches everyone. Whether you write code or run a company, you’re part of the same system — and that system needs to change. The book is both a call to action and a handbook for doing better: building safer, smarter, more human-centered technology. Because we’ve learned the hard way that transformation isn’t just about machines — it’s about accountability, culture, and the people who make technology work for the world.
What do we hope Transform achieves?
What we hope Transform! achieves is simple but ambitious: we want it to change how people think about technology-led transformation — to help them avoid the same costly, painful mistakes that organizations keep repeating.
At one level, it’s practical: if this book helps even a few leaders avoid the pitfalls that destroy value, delay progress, or damage lives, then it will have made a real, material difference. But more than that, we want it to create a shared language between business and technology — to give each side a voice the other can finally hear.
Too often, the business doesn’t understand the real constraints and challenges of technology, and technologists struggle to explain why something can’t simply be “done faster.” Transform! aims to bridge that gap — to make technology intelligible to non-technologists, and to give technologists the confidence to speak the language of business.
We also want to spark a paradigm shift — helping organizations realize that competitiveness now depends on understanding software not as a department, but as a mindset. Companies like Volkswagen have lost years and billions because they failed to grasp this. We want readers to internalize that lesson before it’s too late. And finally, we hope the book helps outsiders hold organizations accountable — investors, regulators, even consumers — so they can see through buzzwords and demand real, sustained competence, not just talk.
If Transform! can get boards, managers, technologists, and stakeholders all thinking differently — if it helps them see transformation as a human, strategic, and cultural mission rather than a procurement exercise — then it will have achieved what we set out to do.
About the Authors
Collectively bringing over a century of experience, the authors have spent their careers working with many of the world’s largest organisations—particularly in the finance, energy, and commodities sectors—helping them navigate the complexities of digital transformation.
With deep insight into the challenges of fast-moving, heavily regulated markets, they have led numerous, highly successful initiatives where others have struggled.
This book reflects their belief that success in transformation is not random, but the result of specific, repeatable behaviours within well-constructed teams.
As software technologies reshape industries and governments alike, the stakes are rising: technical debt and failed initiatives act like barnacles on the bottom of a boat, and some emerging threats now carry massive societal costs.
From AI in healthcare and agriculture to secure digital voting and autonomous vehicles, software is everywhere.
At the same time, citizens are becoming more vocal about data privacy and security concerns.
The rise of Generative AI presents new opportunities—but also new risks.
In response, the authors aim to share practical, hard-won lessons to help others succeed in an increasingly software-defined world.
Ian Murrin
A highly experienced technology leader and entrepreneur with a proven track record of founding, scaling, and exiting high-impact businesses. For over 30 years, this author has guided technology-led transformation (TLT) programs for more than 130 of the world’s most prominent financial institutions, hedge funds, energy majors, and commodities traders—including Shell, BP, Glencore, Anglo American, Deutsche Bank, Nomura, and Morgan Stanley.
In 2000, Ian Murrin founded Digiterre to bridge the gap between business ambition and technology execution. Under his leadership, the company has delivered mission-critical trading applications and data platforms spanning the entire financial markets lifecycle, earning more than 20 industry awards.
Following Digiterre’s acquisition by Ascendion in 2023—a 15,000-person global digital engineering firm—Ian continues to serve as CEO of Digiterre, the specialist engineering division. Recognised as one of the top ten most influential service providers to the global hedge fund sector, he is widely regarded as a thought leader within the industry.
Rajesh Jethwa
A multi-award-winning Chief Technology Officer, Rajesh Jethwa has built a career delivering bespoke solutions for global enterprise organisations. Beginning at Lloyds Banking Group, he specialised in engineering real-time and big data platforms across sales, trading, risk, and eCommerce. Later, he led front-office technology for foreign exchange, money markets, and international payments, creating and managing platforms over a 10-year span.
This experience provided deep expertise across the enterprise software lifecycle—from strategic management priorities to the development and operation of 24/7 mission-critical commercial banking platforms. Recognised five times as one of the UK’s top CIOs, Raj now serves as CTO of Digiterre, consulting with global financial services, energy, and commodities trading firms.
He lead teams tackling complex data and software engineering challenges while advising clients on enterprise agility, technology strategy, and digital transformation.
Mike Wright
Mike Wright has served as CIO for several of the world’s most respected organisations, most recently at McKinsey & Company, the global management consultancy. Previous roles include Head of Technology at Willis Towers Watson, Man Group, and Fidelity International—leaders in insurance, hedge funds, and asset management.
Across these tenures, he led multiple major technology transformations, including the redevelopment of a complex legacy trading application using agile software methodologies when the approach was still in its infancy. His decision to commission Digiterre for this project marked the first use of agile within Man Group, setting a new benchmark for innovation within the organisation.
Before becoming a CIO, Mike worked as a consultant at Accenture and McKinsey, and later founded a software company. He also served as a non-executive director for a digital rights start-up, offering multiple perspectives on the technology industry. Known for driving innovation and transformation, Mike has twice been recognised among the UK’s top CIOs and currently act as an Associate Non-Executive Director at the UK’s Disclosure and Barring Service.
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