“Digital transformation.” We say these two words and, more and more, they sound like a different era: the one with the first webinars and the strategy decks that put “disruption” on every slide. The phenomenon is far from over. What is happening is that the term itself is starting to feel too small. It is worth understanding why, and to do that we need to do something we often skip: look first at how we got here.
What is the centrifuge effect in digital transformation?
Digital transformation is best understood from within. The centrifuge effect is the model I propose for that: technology is not one more piece that changes, but the external force that spins the organization and stirs, all at once, its three internal dimensions:
- Profiles and skills
- Processes
- Organizational model
Unlike the classic people, process, technology, technology sits outside the trio (it is the trigger) and the three dimensions are centrifuged at the same time, not by turns.
A hierarchy of waves
Digital transformation was not a single event, it was a series of disruptive situations that hit companies from the late nineties and, above all, from the start of the two thousands. They did not all weigh the same. Ranking them by impact, rather than by date, already tells us a lot.
Internet came first, with corporate websites and the first ecommerce. A still one-way conversation: the company broadcast, the user received. A huge leap, but a digitized monologue.
Web 2.0 was of a different nature: that is where the rules of communication themselves changed. It blurred who is sender and who is receiver, and it established, de facto, that every person is a communication channel. That disruption needed a travel companion, and it was not a new device, but “the” device: the smartphone. Tablets, wearables and a few other gadgets have come since, all welcome, but mobile is still “the” device: an absolute king that keeps piling on functions, above all transactional ones (we pay with it, we validate entry to venues, and so on). We still want to centralize everything in it.
Then came big data (and its cousin, the internet of things). Enormous power on paper: exploiting unstructured data, combining it with structured data, semantic analysis, sentiment analysis. The problem is that many companies were not ready to take it on. Through much of the 2010s there were plenty who claimed to run on a big data model and, behind closed doors, were still leaning on Excel. Did it look bad to admit it?
A necessary aside: premature technology. Not every technology fits neatly into this hierarchy of waves. Bluetooth is the perfect example: conceived in 1994, it probably arrived too soon. Neither the ecosystem, nor the infrastructure, nor the devices (and above all, not the mindset) were ready; in fact, when the first consumer products showed up, around the year 2000, the environment still wasn’t up to the task. After an initial adoption that was largely technical and niche, the technology seemed destined to remain a minor feature. And yet, a good decade later, it proved to have a massive impact: first with hands-free headsets, then as an omnipresent standard in smartphones, and above all by reinventing itself as Bluetooth Low Energy (2010), which opened the door to wearables and the Internet of Things.
It is the pattern of technology that gets ahead of its time, the kind that arrives before the ecosystem is ready to sustain it, and that only the years eventually put in its place.
From the outside in: the Centrifuge Effect©
So far the external view, the catalog of disruptions. But that reading, on its own, falls short. What matters is not so much which technology arrives, but what it stirs inside the company. And here I propose looking at digital transformation for what it really is: a centrifuge effect.
Technology, in this view, is not one of the pieces that change inside, but the external force that spins the organization at high speed and stirs, all at once, its three internal dimensions:
- Profiles and skills: what people we need and with which skills, some of them not yet in existence.
- Processes: how we work and, above all, how the pieces relate to each other.
- Organizational model: the structure, the roles, who decides and how.
What sets this view apart from the classics (the worn-out people, process, technology) is twofold. First, technology stays outside the trio: it is the trigger, not one of the legs. Second, and this is the important part, the three dimensions do not move by turns, they are centrifuged at the same time.
And as in a real spin, the force also separates: the tensions surface between the old that will not quite leave and the new that will not quite settle in, between specialist and cross-functional profiles, between what is said and what is done.
It is not an entirely new idea: back in 2018 I described digital transformation as a centrifuging element.
The overlapping of waves
Every transformation, like any process, has its phases. Most run in sequence and some in parallel, and it is healthy to have deliverables along the way, because people find it easier to take in and sign off on things that have a recognizable beginning and end. The wear does not come from the wave itself, it appears when the waves overlap: we are asked to take on a new layer when we have not yet closed the previous one.
We started by hiring an ecommerce manager and, before that model had finished settling in, we were already asking the company to take on the intensive exploitation of data. At times it went to the extreme of stringing together two reorganization processes in barely two years, without giving the first one time to settle. And that simply does not pay off: reorganizing on top of what has not yet set does not speed anything up, it only creates strain.
“The overlapping and acceleration of the layers strain the whole chain, from skills to the structure itself, and explain why so many organizations live in a permanent arrhythmia.”
A nuance is worth adding, so as not to get the diagnosis wrong. What gives the feeling that “this never ends” has a catch: each phase does have its end, the thing is that we rarely let it get there before we switch on the next one. And that end, to be useful, cannot be a grandiose “we are now transformed,” because the target moves too fast for that, but something more modest and honest: this specific capability is now assimilated and running.
Today’s turn of the screw and the ones warming the bench
With artificial intelligence comes a turn of the screw that deserves a nuance. The earlier waves changed which tools we used; AI goes straight into the first dimension, the one of skills, because it does not only automate the doing, it starts to automate the thinking. More than one more wave on the list, it is one that acts inside the centrifuge itself.
That said, not everything announced as disruption is ready to be one. It is worth separating potential impact from real maturity, because confusing the two is the source of half the failed hypes.
Today’s disruptive technologies
Potential impact ≠ real maturity
| Technology | Potential impact | Maturity today | Where it stands |
|---|---|---|---|
| Generative AI | Very high | High | Already operational and transforming skills |
| Metaverse | Medium | Low | Second Life already tried it; the brake is still the access device |
| Web3 / Blockchain | Very high | Low | Maximum disruption, but mass adoption has not yet arrived |
| Quantum computing | Maximum | Very low | Its time will come, but it may be a decade away |
Potential impact does not set the timetable. Confusing “this will change everything” with “this changes things now” is what tends to exhaust organizations.
The metaverse, by the way, is not a new idea: Second Life already tried it almost twenty years ago. That it keeps getting stuck invites us to look at the most physical link in the chain, the access device: expensive, complex and too uncomfortable (weight, ergonomics) to sustain hours of use. Sometimes the brake on a disruption is not in the software, it is in what we have to put on our face in order to get in.
So, is the term dead?
Let us go back to the start. Seen this way, the two words start to fail for different reasons.
- “Digital” is now almost redundant: today there is no business that is not digital, just as in the nineteen fifties it would have sounded odd to talk about “electric transformation,” and when an adjective describes everyone, it stops describing anyone.
- “Transformation” carries another problem: we use it as if it were a single project that closes once, when in practice it is a succession of cycles, each with its phases and its deliverable, that our hurry keeps us from respecting.
So no, digital transformation is not finished, and each specific cycle can (and should) be closed. What dates is the label, for what it overpromises and for what we already take for granted. And here it is worth resisting the easy temptation: crowning a newer and shinier term to replace the old one would be falling back into the very hype we criticize.
So what is left as a compass, if the list of waves never ends and the centrifuge starts up again and again? The usual thing, the one that never trades on any trend: vision, vision, and vision.
The ability to read between the lines and tell which waves are worth reorganizing profiles, processes and structure for, which ones are better left to settle before we move again, and which are just well-funded noise. Because technologies will keep coming, some ahead of time and others right on time.
We are not going to stop the centrifuge. But it should be within our hands to decide which way we want to be flung out.
© 2026 Oriol Guitart. The Centrifuge Effect© model has been developed by its author, Oriol Guitart. All rights reserved, for the duration and extent established by the applicable intellectual property law. Any reproduction, distribution, public communication and/or transformation, in whole or in part, is strictly prohibited without the author’s express written authorization, and the author must in any case be credited as such in any subsequent use.
