Is It a Real Digital Strategy—or Just a List of Projects?

Picture a Tuesday steering meeting. Fourteen digital projects sit in fourteen tidy rectangles: a new website, a CRM migration, an app, an analytics platform, an AI assistant, and nine other respectable ideas. Every rectangle has an owner. Every owner has a deadline. Nobody can explain why project seven must exist before project eleven.

The roadmap looks organized. The strategy does not exist.

A real digital strategy is a revisable causal argument about how selected digital capabilities will create a defined form of value. A project list tells you what people plan to build. A strategy explains why those projects belong together, why other projects do not, what must happen first, and what evidence could prove the current route wrong.

That distinction sounds small. In practice, it separates a company that learns from a company that stays busy.

Digital strategy is a causal argument

The word digital causes part of the confusion. It makes ordinary activity sound strategic. A mobile app becomes a “mobile strategy.” A CRM purchase becomes a “customer strategy.” Add enough software nouns to a slide and the slide begins to hum with ambition.

Research offers a stricter view. Bharadwaj and colleagues argue that digital business strategy fuses business and technology strategy. They organize the field around scope, scale, speed, and sources of value creation and capture. The key word is value. Technology is part of the business logic, not an annex full of upgrades.

MIT CISR research makes a related distinction. Digitization standardizes processes and supports efficiency. Becoming digital requires a customer value proposition and digital offerings that deliver it. Both can matter, but they solve different problems.

This gives us a simple test:

A portfolio is mostly nouns. A strategy is a sentence with because.

“Build a portal, replace the CRM, and launch an app” is a list.

“Reduce the time from a qualified request to a confirmed service appointment because speed and certainty drive repeat business” is the start of a strategy. It names a customer, a meaningful change, and a belief about value. Projects can now be judged against it.

A strategy can be deliberate without being rigid

This definition creates a useful tension. Strategy must be clear enough to guide choices, but reality rarely respects the sequence in a slide deck.

Mintzberg and Waters describe deliberate and emergent strategy as two ends of a continuum. Some parts of a realized strategy come from explicit intention. Other parts appear as people act, learn, and recognize patterns that no planning session predicted. The practical choice is not “plan everything” or “improvise everything.” It is to state the current logic clearly enough that evidence can confirm, qualify, or overturn it.

Digital transformation makes that distinction more important. A systematic review of 279 studies found two recurring patterns: organizations move toward more malleable designs that support continuous adaptation, and that adaptation occurs inside changing digital ecosystems (Hanelt et al., 2021). A destination can remain coherent while the route changes.

A project list handles change badly because it has no explicit logic to revise. Teams either protect every approved rectangle or replace one list with another. A strategy can do something more disciplined: preserve the value claim, test the causal route, and change the projects when the evidence demands it.

The route test

A useful strategy should pass four connected tests. Together, they form a route from a value claim to evidence. This follows the central chain in project-portfolio research: business strategy informs portfolio choices, and portfolio management translates those choices into a possible route to business results (Meskendahl, 2010).

Decision framework

A project earns its place by completing the route

Trace a proposed project from the deliberate choice it expresses to the evidence that can revise it.

Choice

What will you do differently?

Capability

What must become possible?

Behavior

What should people do differently?

Value

What useful result should appear?

Evidence

What result would revise the route?

Not now

No defensible link to this route.

1. It names a destination that matters

The destination is not “complete the transformation.” That phrase can mean almost anything, which is why it survives so many meetings.

A useful destination describes a change in customer value, operating capability, or business position. It should be specific enough to guide a choice. For example:

• reduce the time between request and confirmed appointment;
• help account managers identify expansion risk before renewal;
• let customers resolve a common service issue without waiting for support;
• make a complex product easier for a first-time buyer to compare.

These statements are not complete strategies. They are strong starting points because they describe an outcome rather than an output.

This matters in digital work because the field changes quickly. A stable destination gives teams a reason to revise the route instead of defending a fixed list after its assumptions expire.

2. It shows how the projects form a route

Projects in a real strategy are not independent decorations. They create capabilities, remove constraints, or test assumptions for one another.

Consider a regional service company with this initial list:

• redesign the website;
• replace the CRM;
• build a customer portal;
• add automated scheduling;
• launch an AI support assistant.

Assume its value thesis is to reduce the delay between a high-fit request and a confirmed appointment. The list now changes shape.

The company may first need consistent service and availability data. Without that foundation, automated scheduling will confidently offer the wrong appointment. That is efficient in the same way a faster leak is efficient.

The website may need a better qualification flow before it needs a visual redesign. The CRM migration may matter only where it improves the handoff from request to scheduling. A portal may help repeat clients, but it may be unnecessary for first-time customers. The AI assistant belongs later unless support volume is the actual constraint.

The point is not that data work must always come first. The point is that the order should follow a causal model.

Studies of established companies show the same pattern at a larger scale. Research across 25 firms identified two broad digital directions—customer engagement and digitized solutions—and found that both relied on enabling assets such as an operational backbone and a digital services platform (Sebastian et al., 2017). Desired offerings and enabling capabilities must connect. A strategy makes that connection explicit.

Selection is still not enough. Case research in three large construction firms found that successful portfolio management also depended on structural alignment—how the organization assigns ownership, authority, and coordination around the portfolio (Kaiser, El Arbi, and Ahlemann, 2015). A route that works only inside the roadmap software is not yet a route through the organization.

3. It contains refusals

A project list grows by addition. A strategy becomes clear through exclusion.

Michael Porter’s classic distinction between operational effectiveness and strategy still matters here: doing activities well is not the same as choosing a distinct position and a coherent set of activities (Porter, 1996). Digital teams can execute every project on time and still move the business in no clear direction.

A strategic refusal does not mean an idea is bad. It means the idea does not belong on this route now.

For the service company, the refusal might be:

• no consumer mobile app until repeat customers show a recurring mobile need;
• no AI assistant until the company has reliable service data and a measurable support bottleneck;
• no complete visual rebrand when the main problem is request qualification;
• no portal features that do not reduce delay or improve certainty.

These choices protect scarce attention. They also reduce hidden coordination costs. Each new project creates meetings, data dependencies, permissions, maintenance, and decisions. The rectangle on the roadmap is often the cheapest part.

Project-portfolio research treats strategic fit as more than a launch-day selection exercise. Unger and colleagues describe project portfolios as vehicles for strategy implementation and examine the role of terminating projects that no longer fit. In other words, a strategy must be able to say “stop,” not only “start.”

4. It defines evidence and revision rules

A strategy is a theory, not a prophecy. It should say what the first projects are meant to prove.

For the service company, useful evidence might include:

• the share of qualified requests that reach a confirmed appointment;
• median time from request to confirmation;
• the main reasons a qualified request stalls;
• repeat-customer use of self-service scheduling;
• the rate of manual corrections after automation.

These measures connect the work to the value thesis. They also expose failure early. If the qualification flow improves but scheduling delay does not, the constraint may sit in staffing or availability data. If repeat clients ignore the portal, the team should investigate before building six more portal features out of wounded pride.

The front end of a portfolio matters here. A study of 175 firms found a strong positive relationship between front-end success and project-portfolio success. The relationship was stronger for larger portfolios and for portfolios with more interdependence (Kock, Heising, and Gemünden, 2016). The work done before full project commitment is not ceremony. It shapes the quality of the portfolio.

Evidence also keeps alignment alive after planning. Research in large industrial firms describes strategic alignment as a dynamic and continuous activity supported by social, structural, and management practices (Martinsuo and Anttila, 2022). The strategy should guide revision when conditions change, not punish the team for learning.

A real strategy makes the roadmap easier to edit

The strongest sign of a strategy is not a perfect plan. It is a roadmap that becomes easier to challenge.

Ask these questions:

1. What value are you trying to create, and for whom?
2. What must be true for that value to appear?
3. Which capability or constraint does each project address?
4. Which projects depend on other projects?
5. What will you not do yet?
6. What evidence would cause you to change or stop the route?

If the answers are weak, do not solve the problem by adding more detail to the project plan. Detail can make uncertainty look domesticated. It cannot replace an argument.

A genuine digital strategy may fit on one page. It should state the value thesis, the chosen capabilities, the key dependencies, the main refusals, and the evidence that will guide revision. The project portfolio can then carry the operational detail.

This separation helps leaders and delivery teams. Leaders can debate the theory of value instead of defending favorite software. Teams can understand why sequence matters. Project owners can see when their work no longer supports the route. Customers benefit because the company organizes technology around a real need rather than around the availability of technology.

The cold reality is that many organizations do not lack digital ideas. They lack a reason to reject most of them.

A project list is comforting because it turns uncertainty into activity. A strategy does something harder. It chooses a route through uncertainty, explains why the route should work, and leaves enough evidence behind to know when it does not.

References

• Bharadwaj, A., El Sawy, O. A., Pavlou, P. A., & Venkatraman, N. (2013). Digital business strategy: Toward a next generation of insights. MIS Quarterly, 37(2), 471–482.
• Hanelt, A., Bohnsack, R., Marz, D., & Marante, C. A. (2021). A systematic review of the literature on digital transformation: Insights and implications for strategy and organizational change. Journal of Management Studies, 58(5), 1159–1197.
• Kaiser, M. G., El Arbi, F., & Ahlemann, F. (2015). Successful project portfolio management beyond project selection techniques: Understanding the role of structural alignment. International Journal of Project Management, 33(1), 126–139.
• Kock, A., Heising, W., & Gemünden, H. G. (2016). A contingency approach on the impact of front-end success on project portfolio success. Project Management Journal, 47(2), 115–129.
• Martinsuo, M., & Anttila, R. (2022). Practices of strategic alignment in and between innovation project portfolios. Project Leadership and Society, 3, 100066.
• Meskendahl, S. (2010). The influence of business strategy on project portfolio management and its success—A conceptual framework. International Journal of Project Management, 28(8), 807–817.
• Mintzberg, H., & Waters, J. A. (1985). Of strategies, deliberate and emergent. Strategic Management Journal, 6(3), 257–272.
• Porter, M. E. (1996). What is strategy?. Harvard Business Review, 74(6), 61–78.
• Ross, J. W., Beath, C. M., & Sebastian, I. M. (2017). Digitized does not equal digital. MIT Center for Information Systems Research.
• Sebastian, I. M., Ross, J. W., Beath, C., Mocker, M., Moloney, K. G., & Fonstad, N. O. (2017). How big old companies navigate digital transformation. MIS Quarterly Executive, 16(3), Article 6.
• Unger, B. N., Kock, A., Gemünden, H. G., & Jonas, D. (2012). Enforcing strategic fit of project portfolios by project termination. International Journal of Project Management, 30(6), 675–685.