A mid-sized manufacturing company’s general manager hands the ERP migration project to the IT manager and steps back. Six months later, the finance team is skipping the e-Ledger module, the sales team has stopped opening the new order management screens, and the warehouse supervisor has quietly returned to Excel. The project is technically complete and operationally irrelevant. This pattern repeats itself across Turkish mid-market companies with striking regularity: when digital transformation is delegated to IT, the gap between technical delivery and organizational adoption never closes.
Digital transformation is not, at its core, a technology project. It is a change management process. An ERP rollout, an e-Invoice integration, or a cloud-based business intelligence platform only creates value when people change how they work — not when the software goes live. The signal that makes this change feel mandatory must come from the top of the organization. When the CEO does not put their name on the project, employees receive a clear message: this is not urgent, this is not strategic, this is not mine to care about. Middle managers resolve competing priorities in their own favor, the transformation project falls in the queue, and projects in the queue never finish.
The first concrete return on CEO sponsorship appears in resource allocation. A project manager’s request for additional headcount or external consulting support can sit in approval limbo for weeks. In organizations where the CEO is directly engaged, these decisions resolve in days. Budget revisions, cross-departmental cooperation requests, and getting the project on executive meeting agendas — all of these require active CEO involvement. A project manager cannot open these doors alone, no matter how capable.
The second return is prioritization. In most Turkish SMEs and mid-market firms, daily operational pressure continuously pushes medium-term transformation goals backward. The sales director focuses on month-end close, the finance director prepares for the tax period, the production manager handles a delivery crisis. Under these conditions, transformation project meetings get postponed, data cleanup tasks are left half-done, and testing cycles get skipped ‘when there is no time.’ When the CEO places the project on their own performance agenda and includes it in board-level reporting, this postponement dynamic breaks. Priority is only sustained when pressure comes from the top.
The third and least visible return is the culture signal. Organizations watch what their leaders pay attention to. When a CEO attends a project review meeting, asks whether user training has been completed, or directly questions a delay in the e-Ledger migration, these behaviors tell the organization that the transformation is being taken seriously. Conversely, when the CEO hands the project to IT and disappears for months, resistant department heads read that silence as permission. Cultural transformation happens through modeled behavior, not directives — and the model comes from the top.
There is a real obstacle to CEO sponsorship: time and knowledge asymmetry. General managers are not technical experts and do not need to be. The trap, however, is using that technical unfamiliarity as a reason to fully delegate. The CEO’s role is not to architect the system — it is to remove organizational blockers, accelerate decision cycles, and consistently demonstrate that the transformation is a strategic priority. This does not require understanding ERP architecture. It requires understanding which department is resisting, why, and what the managerial reason behind that resistance actually is.
When evaluating whether CEO sponsorship of a transformation project is functional rather than symbolic, a few criteria are worth examining. Do project progress reports reach the general manager directly, or do they stop at the IT manager’s desk? Can cross-departmental conflicts be escalated to senior leadership, or is the project manager expected to resolve them alone? How quickly are budget and resource decisions finalized? Does the CEO publicly own the project’s ROI expectations and timeline? Symbolic sponsorship — attending the kickoff meeting and then stepping away — does not contribute to transformation success. It sends the organization a signal that this too shall pass. Moving digital transformation from an IT project to a strategic organizational initiative starts with the CEO sitting at the table and staying there.
This article was originally written in Turkish by Gökhan MERCANOĞLU on April 10, 2017 and has been automatically translated into English and other languages using machine translation.