Digital Transformation: Cultivate the Talent Rather Than Buy the Platform

Author Finbarr Sheehy

Digital transformation is often sold as a technology story: choose the right platform, implement it well and performance will follow. Yet many organisations, despite major investments in ERP, MES, LIMS, QMS, cloud, analytics and AI, find that benefits don’t appear where they matter most: on the shop floor, in the laboratory, in quality decisions and in the customer or patient experience.

That’s because transformation is not something you can purchase. You can buy software, but you can’t buy the confidence, capability and habits required to use it well. When capability doesn’t grow at the same pace as technology, organisations end up with the most common outcome of all: modern systems running old behaviours.

The hard truth is this:

You can buy a platform. You can’t buy transformation.

What goes wrong most often?

• The technology trap: organisations digitise broken processes. Automating poor workflows doesn’t remove waste, it accelerates it. Errors move faster. Deviations multiply. Data becomes unreliable. People stop trusting the system and return to spreadsheets and workarounds.
• Resistance to change (often a training issue in disguise): when people don’t feel confident using new systems, “resistance” is a rational response. If training is light, generic, or disconnected from real work, adoption collapses.
• Skills gaps: many organisations train a handful of super-users and hope everyone else catches up. Those “star players” become bottlenecks, burn out and progress stalls, while dependence on external support grows.

The organisations that succeed take a different approach: they build capability in three tiers, aligned to the real stages of digital maturity:

1) Operator level: Process Digitisation

• Frontline teams need practical training to digitise work correctly, build confidence and protect data integrity at source.
• NFQ Level 6 Higher Certificate in Process Digitisation

2) Engineer & manager level: Process Digitalisation

• This is where value is unlocked, redesigning and standardising workflows before automating them, building data literacy and scaling beyond pilots.
  NFQ Level 7 Degree in Process Digitalisation

3) Leadership level: Digital Transformation & Strategic Execution

• Leaders must align strategy to execution, remove blockers, govern for scale and build an organisation that can continuously change.
  MSc in Digital Transformation (Life Science)

The key shift is simple: train people in the work, not around the work.
Because when capability grows, adoption grows. When adoption grows, data quality improves. And that’s when your platform investment finally delivers measurable ROI.

About the programmes: digital transformation education for regulated industries

InnoPharma Education provides practical, role-relevant programmes designed for regulated environments where quality and compliance are critical:

• NFQ Level 6 Higher Certificate in Process Digitisation
• NFQ Level 7 Degree in Process Digitalisation
• MSc in Digital Transformation (Life Science)

Whether your organisation is starting out or struggling to scale, the goal is the same: build the internal capability that makes technology work.

Your next step: make your platform investment pay off

If adoption is inconsistent or ROI is unclear, the answer is rarely another tool—it’s capability.

Ask yourself:
• Do operators confidently capture data digitally, every time?
• Can engineers redesign processes before automating them?
• Do leaders align strategy, governance and culture?

If not, training isn’t a side activity. It is the transformation.

InnoPharma Education can help you build that capability.
Explore our programmes—Level 6 Process Digitisation, Level 7 Process Digitalisation and the MSc in Digital Transformation (Life Science)—and take the next step toward sustainable, measurable transformation.