The 3 Things Killing Your Digital Transformation (That Have Nothing to Do With Technology)
I recently sat down with Anne Emberson, Vice President of Digital at Nalco Water, an Ecolab company, and the conversation went in a direction I didn’t quite expect.
We were supposed to talk about digital transformation. And we did. But we kept circling back to the same uncomfortable truth: the problem usually isn’t technology, it’s everything around it.
Anne has spent over two decades at the intersection of manufacturing, technology, and transformation, time at Accenture leading global ops overhauls, time at Microsoft helping manufacturers accelerate digital change from the inside, and now leading commercial digital strategy for industrial customers across food and beverage, energy, chemicals, mining, and more. She’s seen digital projects succeed. She’s seen more of them stall. And she’s made a career out of knowing the difference.
You Don’t Have a Data Problem. You Have a “Waiting for Perfect Data” Problem.
I hear this constantly. But we can’t move yet because the data isn’t clean, complete, or integrated enough. We need one more quarter.
Anne’s response? You’ll be waiting forever.
“If we’re waiting for perfect data, we’re likely gonna be waiting an infinite amount of time,” she told me. “We have a ton of data in the manufacturing space, so let’s take that and use it to act on.”
Manufacturers are sitting on more operational data than they know what to do with. The issue isn’t availability, it’s starting. You don’t need to be perfect. You need direction. Pick an operational problem with real financial stakes, use the data you have today, and improve your data infrastructure around the questions you’re actually asking.
Stop Calling It a Digital Project
This one hit me. Anne’s framing was simple and exactly right: the moment you label something a digital initiative or IT project, you’ve already started losing.
“Start out not thinking of it as a technology or IT or a digital project,” she said. “It is solving an operational challenge. That changes the mindset.”
When it’s framed as a digital project, IT owns it, operations consumes it, and quality reacts to it later. When it’s an operational challenge with measurable KPIs attached from day one, financial or otherwise, the whole thing runs differently. People are accountable to results, not deployments.
She also pointed to DMAIC as a framework worth borrowing here. Manufacturers already know how to run a structured problem-solving process. Apply that same rigor to a digital initiative: define the problem, tie it to an outcome, build from there. The tool is not the destination. The result is.
The Trifecta: Technology, People, Problem
Anne described her three-part recipe for a digital initiative that actually sticks: the right technology, the right people, and a clearly defined problem. All three have to be strong. One weak leg and the whole thing wobbles.
The people piece is where most teams underinvest, treating adoption as something you solve in the final phase. Anne takes the opposite approach. Get end users involved early, even if they can’t speak to the technical requirements. They understand the process. They know where the friction lives.
She also made a point I want to flag specifically:
“Sometimes I’ve found the biggest naysayer can be the best person to be on the project team. If you can convince them to do it, and they have the respect of their coworkers, the rollout might be easier.”
That’s counterintuitive, and it’s true. A skeptic who gets brought in early, heard, and won over becomes a peer-level advocate in a way no top-down mandate ever can.
Build Cross-Functional, or Build It Twice
Anne kept coming back to silos. No digital problem belongs to one function, and if you scope the team that way, you’ll solve it incompletely and redo the work when the next group gets pulled in.
“Bringing in that cross-functional group early on really helps reinvent the process or reinvent the solution,” she said. “Having that bigger picture forces us to think big and then come to the solution.”
Before you talk to vendors, identify which three to five functions have to change behavior for this initiative to succeed. Get their leaders aligned on a shared metric. Only then do you start building the tech stack.
On AI: Two Myths Worth Busting
We closed out talking about AI, and Anne named two things she’s tired of hearing.
First: AI can do everything. It can’t. Second: AI is going to take everyone’s jobs. It won’t.
“The purpose of AI is to allow us to make decisions smarter, faster, better,” she said. “Start somewhere, start now, and grow on it.”
Her analogy stuck with me: digital is like planting a garden. It’s evergreen. You have to keep watering it. AI learns from what you feed it, and the people using it have to build the discipline to work with it differently. One-time deployments don’t cut it.
She also surfaced something manufacturers navigating ESG commitments should pay attention to: the environmental cost of AI itself. Her team ran an experiment — they had ChatGPT generate a rock song, then calculated the energy and water it consumed. The result was equivalent to roughly 1% of a steel production run. One song. That’s a conversation the industry hasn’t fully started yet.
The Tipping Point
I asked Anne what’s got her excited about manufacturing right now, and she used a phrase I’ve been thinking about since: tipping point.
“We’re really getting to that tipping point in the manufacturing space where technology is meeting manufacturing where it is.”
The back office figured a lot of this out first. Now those lessons are making their way to the plant floor, in lower-risk, more practical ways. And the manufacturers who get there first will be the ones who stopped waiting for perfect data, stopped calling it a digital project, and started treating transformation as the operational discipline it actually is.
Listen to the full episode with Anne Emberson on the Shop Floor, Top Floor Talk Show, and if your team is still waiting for perfect data or the right moment to start, EASE was built to help you move sooner than you think.
