Why Some Industries Keep Missing The Digital Train

InnovationWhy Some Industries Keep Missing The Digital TrainByMichael Tyrimos,Forbes Councils Member.for Forbes Technology CouncilCOUNCIL POSTExpertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author. | Membership (fee-based)May 11, 2026, 06:45am EDTMichael Tyrimos is the Founder/CEO of Capacitor Partners, an operations and technology consultancy that transforms large-scale enterprises. getty​Walk into the boardroom of an oil company, a mining firm or a government agency and you’ll find two things. A polished deck full of digital transformation ambitions. And, if you ask the right questions, a quiet admission that most of the pilots from the last three years never actually scaled.This is the defining paradox of digital transformation in 2026. Every industry claims to be doing it. Budgets are approved, consultants are hired, and programs are launched. Yet a survey of 3,186 CIOs and technology executives across 88 countries found that fewer than half of all digital initiatives meet or exceed their business outcome targets. And that average conceals something worse: Certain industries are failing at rates that would concern any executive who looked closely at the numbers.The Industries Falling Furthest BehindConstruction is a useful place to start because it rarely gets mentioned in these conversations. The sector employs 7% of the world’s working-age population, yet labor productivity has remained essentially flat for two decades while manufacturing productivity nearly doubled. McKinsey’s industry digitization research has long identified it as one of the least digitized sectors in the economy, just above agriculture.It doesn’t improve much from there. The public sector and energy companies have evolved the least among the industries measured, according to the BCG Digital Acceleration Index, which assessed organizations across 27 countries. Most still run siloed, business unit-driven operating models, which is precisely...