Reading Room has published research showing that digital transformation spending has increased at most medium to large UK organisations, even as many projects stall during implementation.
The study surveyed 150 senior digital transformation leaders at UK organisations with revenue of more than GBP £30 million.
Year-on-year spending rose at 85% of the organisations surveyed, with most reporting annual digital transformation budgets of between GBP £10 million and GBP £25 million. But the research suggests higher spending has not led to smoother delivery.
A third of respondents said implementation and integration is the stage where digital transformation projects most often stall. Strategy and planning was the next most cited point of difficulty at 17%, followed by budget approval at 15%.
Delays were common. More than half of respondents, 54%, said most or all of their digital transformation programmes run over schedule. Among those reporting overruns, 56% said projects were typically delayed by between three and six months, while one in 10 said delays often stretched to as much as a year.
Main barriers
When respondents ranked the factors that most often slowed digital delivery, compliance or security concerns came out on top, followed closely by data quality issues and legacy technology problems.
The findings suggest pressure comes not only from technical constraints but also from organisational complexity. Nearly a third of respondents, 29%, said their organisations were running between six and 10 digital transformation projects at the same time.
Half of the organisations surveyed said competing internal priorities slowed projects often or very often, suggesting portfolio management and sequencing remain significant challenges for companies trying to modernise multiple systems or services at once.
Reading Room linked the pattern to a broader execution problem rather than weak investment appetite. It said the findings echoed concerns raised in reviews of public sector digital programmes, where technical complexity and integration demands have often been underestimated.
Polly Lygoe, Managing Director at Reading Room, said the agency sees the results as pointing to a cultural issue as much as a technical one.
"Our research found this implementation stalling pattern to be consistent across sectors, different types of organisations, and revenue bands, which points away from purely technical explanations and towards something more cultural. We find that implementation failures almost always come down to underestimating what large-scale transformation actually involves. There's a lot that needs to align to make them a success. Platform readiness, data readiness, programme stream alignment all need to come together at once. But the thing that organisations most consistently overlook is cultural readiness. Transformation tends to be driven by a few internal advocates for whom the change feels exciting and necessary, but what's harder to achieve is the thing that's actually most vital for successful implementation - genuine buy-in from the people impacted by the changes day-to-day."
Execution strain
The results add to a long-running debate over whether UK organisations are overestimating their ability to deliver large transformation agendas at pace. With budgets rising and project volumes increasing, the survey suggests many businesses still struggle to align systems, data, governance and staff around change programmes.
Implementation and integration are often the point where those pressures become most visible. Organisations may secure funding and define a strategy, but execution can slow once teams face practical issues such as linking old and new systems, managing risk controls and dealing with incomplete or inconsistent data.
The research also indicates that digital leaders are operating in crowded internal environments. Running several transformation initiatives at once can create competition for funding, technical resources, executive attention and operational support, even before projects encounter formal compliance or security hurdles.
Lygoe said many companies risk spreading themselves too thinly.
"Appetite for digital transformation is growing, but many companies seem to be getting a little lost and trying to do too much at once. The most successful projects are mapped out with a clear business case and expected outcomes from the start, are done in very clear, realistic phases, and are tracked and measured regularly throughout the process. Organisations would be wise to focus on a couple of business-critical areas rather than trying to do everything at once. It's easy to get excited by new technologies and the opportunities they present, but if companies are trying to do too much at once or there is not a clear business case, success will be limited."