Blog post by: Chris Smith, Practice Director, Sage Intacct, Net at Work and Eric Sluss, Chief Information Officer, Fractional CIO & Advisory Practice, Net at Work

Mid-market companies often run on systems that were perfect when the business was smaller, but now deal with an aging ERP with a few bolt-on tools, and a lot of heroic spreadsheet work in between. As you try to grow revenue, add locations, or launch new offerings, that setup can quietly cap how fast you move, how lean you stay, and how confidently you use data and AI.

Based on a video discussion between two of Net at Work’s business transformation leaders, this article makes the case for treating modernization as a growth priority rather than an IT initiative. It outlines four practical transformation outcomes, offers guidance on framing modernization in ways that build team buy-in, and explains how AI and a fractional CIO partner support execution.

In this article you will learn:

  • How to tell if your operations feel more like 2025 or 2005 when you follow processes end to end
  • The four outcomes that define meaningful digital transformation (streamlined processes, digitized paperwork, enabled employees, better customer experience)
  • Why tech projects with good software can still disappoint when they lack a clear business plan and story for employees
  • How to frame modernization as an investment in your team, not a threat to their jobs
  • Where AI can genuinely accelerate work once you have a solid foundation—and why you may need an “architect” or fractional CIO to build the right digital transformation roadmap

If you prefer to watch the discussion, you can also catch the full video that inspired this piece.

If we walked into your business tomorrow, what year would it feel like?

Some companies feel like it’s 2026 the moment you walk in. Work flows smoothly through digital systems. People can answer questions without searching for a spreadsheet. Nobody fears that touching an integration will break the entire system. Others feel a little more like 2006, or even 1997.

You see paper stacked everywhere. Reports get stitched together at the last minute. There’s that one person who knows how to pull numbers out of the system, and everyone else forms a quiet line at their door.

Both types of companies might be running ERP. Both might be profitable. The difference is how they think about modernization. For some, it’s an annoying “IT thing” they’ll get to later. For others, it’s the plan for how they’ll grow.

Growth plans that don’t quietly double headcount

Most leadership teams have some version of the same story: grow revenue significantly in the next few years. Maybe it’s double revenue in five. Maybe it’s aggressive expansion into new regions or lines of business. The math that hides underneath is where things get interesting.

If your business runs on email approvals, legacy ERP, and a lot of heroics, then growth usually means one thing: more people doing more work the hard way. Double the revenue often comes suspiciously close to doubling the back office. That might work for a while, but it’s not a long-term strategy – especially in a tight labor market.

Modernization is what lets you rewrite that script. It’s how you grow without simply adding more humans to patch the gaps. When we talk about modern ERP, cloud, or AI, what we’re really talking about is moving work through cleaner, more automated processes so you can add entities, products, locations, or programs without building a new spreadsheet empire each time – and giving leaders timely, trustworthy information so they can go after the right opportunities.

That doesn’t start with “Which system should we buy?” It starts with “How do we want this business to run when we hit those growth numbers?”

Digital transformation, without the buzzwords

Digital transformation is one of those phrases that means everything and nothing at the same time. To keep ourselves honest, we boil it down to four outcomes. If a project doesn’t move the needle in at least a couple of these, we’re not interested.

  1. Streamlined processes. When you follow an order, job, or case from beginning to end, the path should make sense. Work should flow from step to step without constant detours through inboxes, personal spreadsheets, and side conversations. Most organizations know their processes are more tangled than they should be. Modernization is the chance to untangle and simplify.
  2. Digitized paperwork. Walk through a plant, warehouse, office, or clinic and you can see how modern things are by the state of the printer. If pick tickets, POs, invoices, or job packets still live on paper, that paper is compensating for a process that never got fully digitized. Moving that work into electronic workflows with approvals and audit trails speeds things up and reduces errors. It also makes remote and hybrid work much less painful.
  3. Enabled employees. You can see this in the expressions on people’s faces. Do they feel like the tools help them, or do they feel like they’re constantly wrestling the system just to do the basics? Modernization should feel like an investment in your team: clearer dashboards, better training, and more time for work that actually requires judgment rather than endless rekeying.
  4. Better customer experience. When you streamline processes, digitize the paper, and enable your people, customers feel the difference. Quotes arrive faster. Status updates are accurate. Invoices match what everyone agreed to. You become easier to work with, even if customers never hear the names of the systems behind the scenes.

Notice that none of those outcomes mentions a specific product. Tech is the tool to facilitate the outcome. The outcomes are simply the reasons you pick up the tools in the first place.

Why “good” tech projects still disappoint

We’ve both watched organizations choose a solid ERP, hire a capable implementer, hit their go-live date… and then quietly slide back into old habits.

Too many modernization efforts start life as system projects. There’s a budget and a timeline, but no clear, shared sense of why this matters for the business or how success will be measured a year or two down the road. No one has written down which risks are being reduced, which growth moves will be easier, or what “worth it” looks like.

When that’s missing, your team hears a simpler story: someone bought a new system and we all have to figure it out. We’d rather see those projects start with a business plan, not a tech plan. Before anyone touches a configuration screen, we want to see:

  • A straightforward description of the outcomes leadership expects
  • A realistic view of the risks if nothing changes
  • A sketch of how the project will be judged 12–24 months after go-live

Then we want to see how that story will be shared with the people doing the work.

How you talk about modernization matters more than you think

Modernization has a PR problem within many organizations. People hear “new system” and immediately think disruption, rework, and more things to learn. That’s partly because nobody ever frames it in terms of the pain they already feel.

Think about a finance team that has been wrestling with an old system for years. Month-end is always late. Reporting is always a scramble. Integrations break at the worst possible moment. They have been telling anyone who will listen that the tools are slowing them down.

You can walk in one day and say: we’re implementing a new financial system; here’s the training calendar. Or you can say: we agree this system is holding us back, and we’re doing something about it. The goal of this project is to reduce the month-end grind, cut down on manual reconciliations, and connect finance to the other systems you rely on. We want you focused on analyzing the numbers, not wrestling them to the ground.

Those two messages land very differently. The project is the same. The framing changes everything. In the second version, modernization feels like leadership finally acting on long-standing complaints. It also makes it clear the intent is to change the work, not replace the workers.

When we see teams lean into modernization – ask good questions, volunteer for pilots, become champions – it’s almost always because someone took the time to explain the “why” in language that connected to their lived experience.

AI as an accelerator, not a magic wand

Now add AI to the mix and the noise level goes up. Leaders hear about co-pilots that summarize reports, explain variances, draft emails, and surface anomalies. Vendors demo AI features. Boards start asking about the AI plan. Nobody wants to be the last company still printing spreadsheets and stapling them to folders.

We’re pretty bullish on AI, but not for the hype. Used thoughtfully, it’s an incredibly fast collaborator. In our own work, AI helps us get unstuck and move faster. We use it to sift through long transcripts, draft roadmaps and communication plans, outline training, and explore options we might not have thought of. It takes care of the heavy, repetitive thinking so we can spend more time on judgment calls and conversations.

What makes AI genuinely powerful is context. The more you use it inside your real business, with your real goals and language, the more useful it becomes. What it doesn’t do is rescue you from messy processes and scattered data. Drop AI into a world where every report lives in a different spreadsheet and nobody is quite sure which system is right, and you end up with more noise, not better decisions.

So if you feel pressure to “do something with AI,” it can help to start with a modernization lens. Where are your people doing heavy, repetitive work today? Where are decisions lagging because information is hiding in too many places? Those are better places to start than whatever feature name is trending on social media.

You know the house. You need the blueprint.

Most executive teams we work with have a clear sense of the company they want to run.

The hard part is turning that picture into a practical sequence of changes.

That’s where an architect’s mindset comes in handy. You wouldn’t start building a house by ordering windows and pouring concrete before anyone drew up plans. Yet that’s essentially what a lot of companies do with technology.

We’ve seen teams invest months in rolling out a stand-alone payments tool, only to rip it out later because the new ERP they chose already did what they needed in a more integrated way. We’ve seen process automation land on top of workflows that everyone quietly agreed were broken. We’ve seen integrations built as one-offs nobody documented, leaving leaders afraid to touch anything.

Bringing in a fractional CIO to drive digital transformation initiatives avoids that pattern by taking a holistic view of people, processes, and systems and asking:

  • Where are we today, honestly?
  • Where are we trying to be in three to five years?
  • What’s the smartest order of operations to get there, given our capacity and constraints?

Sometimes the answer is a new ERP. Sometimes it’s re-implementing what you already own with a better design. Sometimes it’s moving an existing system into managed cloud hosting and cleaning up the reporting and automation around it. Sometimes the first move is data cleanup and governance, so AI and analytics have something solid to work with. The tools matter, but the sequence and the story matter more.

So where do you start?

If that “what year would it feel like?” question sticks with you, that’s a good sign. It means you’re noticing the gap.

To begin closing that gap, start by walking through your own business. Follow one important process from start to finish and notice where it feels current and where it feels outdated. Ask a few trusted people what drives them crazy about how things work today. Look at your growth slides and ask yourself whether your systems are designed to support that story or if they are quietly holding it back.

So yes, you’ll look at ERP platforms, AI capabilities, hosting options, and all the rest. Those are important choices. But the deeper decision is how you want your business to work three to five years from now — and what kind of foundation you need to start building today.

That’s a much better conversation than “do we upgrade this year.” And if you’d like people in the room who have had that conversation with a lot of other companies like yours, that’s exactly the work we do at Net at Work.

If this sparked ideas and you want more context and examples, the full video discussion is well worth a watch.