Almost every large organisation here has a digital transformation programme. Far fewer can tell you what they're transforming into.
The label has become a category of spend rather than a destination. There's a budget line, a steering committee, a slide with arrows pointing right. What's often missing is the second half of the sentence: transforming from this specific problem into that specific better state, measured this specific way.
Without that, "transformation" absorbs everything. A new portal is transformation. Moving a workload is transformation. Buying a tool nobody asked for is transformation. The word is broad enough to cover any activity and vague enough to never be wrong, which is exactly why it survives review after review while the underlying business runs much as it did before.
The programmes that actually change something tend to be the ones that named a concrete outcome first and reached for the technology second. Reduce the time to open an account. Close the books faster. Take a process that took a fortnight and make it take a day. Those are testable. You know if you got there.
The ones that struggle usually started from the tool and worked backwards to find a problem grand enough to justify it.
Before signing off on transformation, it's worth asking the unglamorous question out loud: into what, and how will we know it worked.