Unlock Your Digital Potential

Ask a leadership team where the organisation creates most of its value, and you will usually get a confident answer. Ask them to show the numbers that connect that answer to cost, capacity and performance, and the room goes quiet. The figures exist. They just live in different places, owned by different teams, built for different purposes.

That gap is expensive. McKinsey’s 2021 global survey of 1,034 people involved in transformations found that fewer than a third described their programme as successful. Even the successful ones captured, on average, only 67 per cent of the financial benefit they believed was available. Everyone else captured 37 per cent [1]. Respondents placed nearly a quarter of that lost value in the target-setting phase, before any change had been made [1]. BCG’s study of 895 companies reached a similar headline: 70 per cent of digital transformations fall short of their objectives [2].

Value is lost on day one because the targets are set against a picture of the organisation that nobody can fully see.

Three ledgers that never meet

Most organisations keep three separate accounts of how they operate.

• Cost sits in finance systems, organised by cost centre, department and general ledger code.
• Capacity sits in workforce plans, rotas and resourcing spreadsheets, organised by team and headcount.
• Performance sits in operational dashboards and process documentation, organised by service line or programme.

Each ledger is accurate on its own terms. The problem is that none of them is organised around the thing leaders actually need to decide on: the capabilities the organisation delivers, and the work that delivers them.

Robert Kaplan and Michael Porter made this point sharply about healthcare in Harvard Business Review. Providers, they argued, measured costs by specialty or department rather than by the patient’s full cycle of care, so nobody could say what a given treatment really cost or how that cost related to the outcome [3]. The same pattern is common far beyond hospitals. Costs are aggregated where they are paid, not where value is created.

Capacity is the hidden variable

The cost of a process is not simply the salaries of the people involved. It is the time the work takes, multiplied by what that time costs, set against how much time is really available.

This is the logic of time-driven activity-based costing, set out by Kaplan and Steven Anderson in Harvard Business Review in 2004 [4]. Their method needs only two estimates: the cost per unit of time of supplying capacity, and the time each activity consumes. Its most useful by-product is visibility of unused capacity, which conventional allocation methods quietly spread across every activity [4].

When capacity data sits apart from cost and performance data, that unused capacity disappears into averages. A team can look efficient on a dashboard while carrying slack, or look expensive while actually being under-resourced for the work routed to it. Neither is visible until the three ledgers are joined.

The hidden data factory

Organisations rarely leave this gap unattended. They fill it with people.

Analysts reconcile finance extracts with workforce plans. Programme teams rebuild process maps for each business case. Consultants are engaged to produce a baseline that will be out of date by the next budget cycle. Thomas Redman, writing in MIT Sloan Management Review, calls this work the “hidden data factory”: the effort spent finding, checking and correcting data before it can be used. He estimates the cost of bad data at 15 to 25 per cent of revenue for most companies [5].

The public sector shows the same symptoms. The UK National Audit Office found a culture of tolerating and working around poor data across government, and more than 20 different ways of identifying businesses and individuals across 10 departments and agencies [6].

Why it matters more now

The pressure on this gap is rising. Gartner reported in February 2025 that 63 per cent of organisations either lack, or are unsure they have, the right data management practices for AI. It predicts that through 2026, organisations will abandon 60 per cent of AI projects that are not supported by AI-ready data [7].

Operating model decisions face the same constraint. An AI assistant cannot tell you which capability is overspending if cost, capacity and performance have never been linked. Neither can an analyst, without weeks of reconciliation.

The analyst community has noticed. In July 2026 Gartner published its first Magic Quadrant for Digital Twin of an Organization Platforms, describing a dynamic model that helps enterprises plan and manage initiatives with many interdependencies [8]. The category exists because the connection between the ledgers has become a problem worth buying a solution for.

What a connected view looks like

The fix is not another dashboard sitting on top of the same disconnected sources. It is a model in which the three ledgers share a common spine.

1. Capabilities as the spine. A capability map describes what the organisation does, independent of who does it or which system supports it. It changes slowly, which makes it a stable anchor.
2. Processes beneath each capability. Each capability is delivered by work that can be drawn, timed and staffed.
3. Capacity and rates on the process. When each step carries a duration, a resource and a cost per hour, cost becomes a property of the work rather than an allocation from a ledger.
4. Performance rolled upward. Time, cost and efficiency calculated at process level aggregate to the capability, and then to the whole organisation.

With that structure in place, “where does value sit?” becomes a question you can answer by looking, rather than one you commission a study to answer.

Where MIRAI fits

MIRAI is built on this structure. It connects a capability map, swimlane process models, simulation and a change portfolio in one model. Each swimlane can be synchronised to a capability. A rate card gives each lane a cost per hour, and simulated time, cost and efficiency roll up from process to capability to the organisation map.

Cost data is controlled per user. People without finance access see a dash in place of figures, in every view and every export. The simulation features have been built and tested on sample processes.

Questions to ask your own organisation

• Can we name our ten most expensive capabilities, and show how that cost is built up?
• Do we know where our unused capacity sits, or only our headcount?
• How many times this year have we rebuilt the same baseline for a different programme?
• If we changed one process tomorrow, how long would it take to see the effect on cost at capability level?