The cost of not knowing what things cost

Process transformation has been a fixture on the enterprise agenda for 30 years, moving through successive waves: business process reengineering, Lean and Six Sigma, robotic process automation and now agentic AI. Each arrived with genuine methodology, a consulting infrastructure and case studies demonstrating impressive operational results. However, the actual returns paint a different picture. Recent Bain research found that 88% of business transformations fail to achieve their original ambitions. Organizations that have become demonstrably better at executing processes have not, in most cases, materially benefited from it.

The explanation most commonly offered is implementation failure: change management gaps, technology underperformance, organizational resistance, insufficient executive sponsorship. These are real factors, but ones that perhaps take a back seat to how and by whom transformation programs define success. In other research, Gartner reported that 67% of CFOs believe their digital spending is underperforming against expected outcomes, primarily due to poor CFO-CIO alignment, and that only 30% of CFO-CIO relationships can be described as strong digital partnerships. That gap isn’t a communication problem. Rather, it speaks to the need for a better framework for defining what a process is worth before the program launches.