There's a question every organization should ask before its next platform investment, AI initiative, CRM upgrade, or website rebuild.
John Pehler posed it plainly at the Digital Momentum Summit: "Could a competitor of yours buy your entire tech stack tomorrow and reproduce the advantage that you have?"
The answer, for most organizations, should be uncomfortable.
If the advantage lives inside the software license, the advantage is available to anyone with the same budget and procurement cycle. Your CMS, CRM, analytics platform, marketing automation suite, AI assistant, commerce engine, and portal infrastructure can all be purchased.
The same vendors will sell them to your competitors. The same implementation patterns will appear in your industry. The same feature lists will find their way into another board deck.
Which was the central challenge in Pehler's session. He asked the audience to consider the difference between doing business digitally and becoming a digital business. The distinction matters because many organizations have websites, forms, product finders, dashboards, etc. but the real difference is "whether anything compounds, whether you build upon what you've already had so that you don't have to recreate that at each and every step along the way."
The Advantage Lives in Context
When Pehler asked whether a competitor could reproduce your advantage by buying your tech stack, he pointed to what the tech stack cannot capture.
"There is context in your business that is both within the assets of your organization as well as the human assets, "he said. Those assets, in his words, "make up the strategic differentiator you have."
That context is rarely stored in one place.
It lives in the way sales interprets signals from a customer, in the way operations knows which handoffs break down under pressure, in the content your team trusts, the data your people know how to challenge, the workflows that have been refined through years of friction, and the decision that can be automated because the rules are clear.
If a business invests in modern tools, yet the surrounding operating model remains unchanged, the work still travels through the same silos. The handoffs still love context, and data still records what happened rather than shaping the next action.
Which is what Pehler highlights when he asks, "does a digital interaction just record what happened or does it change what happens next?"
Digital Maturity Is Found in the Workflow
Simple progressions help to illustrate the point.
A company may start by digitizing how it takes orders, which is useful, but the larger leap happens when the entire workflow becomes digital: the order updates dynamically based on available information, routes to the right fulfillment centre, balances customer experience with company economics, and makes decisions in real time.
And that thinking applies well beyond commerce.
"A transaction is not just an order in the traditional ecommerce way," explained Pehler, noting that it can be a referral, an event registration, an investor inquiry, a member renewal, a document request, a financing application, or a partner workflow.
Every interaction carries a signal, and the opportunity is to decide whether that signal remains trapped inside a system of record or becomes part of a system of action.
MIT CISR's research on future ready firms reinforces the scale of the opportunity. In a study of 1,311 global firms, MIT CISR found that only 22% had reached a future ready state, meaning they had developed the capabilities to innovate, engage, and satisfy customers while reducing costs. Those firms reported average revenue growth of 17.3% point above industry averages and net margins 14.0 percentage points above industry averages.
Those results suggest that digital maturity has little patience for isolated tools. Performance comes from the way technology, data, customer experience, operating discipline, and organizational learning combine.
Start With the Operating System
Near the end of his session, Pehler returned to three grounding questions: "Do you have a defined operating system for your business? Does the organization fully understand it? Does the organization understand their role in the operating system?"
Those questions belong at the beginning of every digital road map.
A technology plan asks what to implement, an operating models asks how the business creates value, and a maturity model asks where value needs to compound first.
Pehler described momentum as position plus direction plus energy. The metaphor works because transformation is not a single destination. A company can be digitally advanced in one area and immature in another. The right question is where the organization sits today, where it needs to move, and which sources of energy will create the greatest acceleration.
"It needs to be tailored to your business," he said. For some businesses, data is the differentiator, and for others, it may be content and knowledge, customer experience, employee experience, supplier integration, partner workflow, or member service.
The stack matters, but the stack is the instrument, not the music.
About John Pehler
John Pehler is the Founder of E3 Omni, a digital growth and transformation consultancy that helps organizations align strategy, technology, data, and customer experience to create sustainable competitive advantage. With extensive leadership experience spanning digital commerce, manufacturing, distribution, and enterprise transformation, John works with organizations to move beyond isolated technology investments and build operating models that drive measurable outcomes.