At the ASUG Executive Exchange summit recently held in Seattle, Patrick Dineen, Senior Vice President, Finance Systems Transformation at NBCUniversal (NBCU), shared his perspective on digital transformation, offering strategic insights from his years overseeing complex projects at multinational firms.
Dineen, a well-known figure in finance and operations circles, delivered a compelling message to attendees: for a transformation to succeed, it must be comprehensive, competitive, and resilient. Below are some top takeaways from his presentation:
The Strategic Power of Transformation
Dineen stressed that one of the most overlooked aspects of digital transformation is its strategic potential for competitive advantage. “Winning companies adopt digital cores because they need to act quickly and stay agile,” he explained. “We need to talk more about winning in these conversations, about big changes that make a difference. Transformation should give companies a competitive edge—it’s about making sure your organization is poised to be a market leader.”
He cited research indicating that companies with agile digital infrastructures outperform peers in cash conversion by 7-9%. “That’s a huge incentive to pursue transformation,” he said. “The potential for companies to pull ahead financially isn’t just theoretical—it’s real, and it’s measurable.”
Dineen also emphasized that transformation cannot succeed without purpose-driven vision. He drew on William Bridges’ Four Ps of Change Management—Purpose, Picture, Plan, and Part—as a guiding framework. “The ‘purpose’ part is critical. It’s not enough to say, ‘We’re doing this to cut costs or because we need a clean core.’ Transformation needs a meaningful purpose that people can stand behind,” he noted.
This guiding vision must be detailed in a way that employees at all levels can understand. “People need a picture of what the future state will look like—something they can visualize. That’s what gets people engaged,” he said.
Operational Challenges on the Ground
One of the most hard-earned lessons Dineen shared was the importance of approaching transformation at the individual level. All transformation is personal, he explained. “You can’t change an organization without reaching individuals, defining each person’s role and ensuring they understand what’s expected of them amid transformation. Projects need to resonate deeply across the business so that everyone is inclined to engage and feel supported,” he said. Relying solely on intellectual persuasion is ineffective; it’s essential to align hearts and minds with the initiative.
In past projects, Dineen and his team created a “transformation inventory” to track thousands of changes across the organization, he explained, but this approach alone was insufficient. While his team had all changes tracked in a document that leadership signed off on, the absence of accountability measures resulted in most employees not remembering their responsibilities by the time the project went live. This experience led Dineen to advocate for more individualized change management plans where accountability is built in from the start.
Another major operational pitfall he identified is the risk of “quiet lift and shift,” a term Dineen used to describe how employees superficially adopt new processes while creating workarounds to maintain old practices. “If leaders see requests for more headcount in areas where new tech is being introduced, it can be a red flag that people haven’t truly embraced transformation,” Dineen warned. “Often, they don’t even realize they’re doing it,” he said, noting that it’s a natural response to stick to familiar patterns.
To prevent this, Dineen recommended establishing “future-state shared visions” for each role and offering clear before-and-after maps for employee responsibilities. “When we split my former company in half, we conducted detailed activity assessments to understand what every employee did,” he said. “For future transformations, we need to replicate that level of role clarity.”
Dineen emphasized that change management is a critical piece of all implementations. “We need people rallying behind these projects, as they are challenging and inevitably face setbacks.” Gaining support means ensuring people believe in the purpose of the overarching change. Dineen’s recommendation? Engage stakeholders in sessions focused on why the project matters: Will it increase profitability? Is it about competitive advantage?
Rethinking Scope and Financial Realities
On the topic of scope, Dineen argued that, while most transformation experts advocate narrowing one’s scope, expansive scopes can sometimes be essential to the overall success of a project. “If you don’t include enough scope, you’re going to limit your ability to make meaningful changes,” he said. “I’ve seen projects fail because they weren’t ambitious enough. At my previous company, we learned that order-to-cash issues could have been avoided if we’d included more upstream processes.”
Dineen criticized top-down business cases that rely on high-level benchmarks without detailing specific, actionable steps. “A business case should be built from the ground up, listing actual employee numbers, specific tasks, and clear timelines,” he said.
Dineen also highlighted the importance of involving financial planning and analysis (FP&A) teams from start to finish, recounting an experience where late FP&A engagement led to distrust in project data. He noted that data inconsistencies can spell trouble for any project involving multiple stakeholders across a business. “The fastest way to lose faith in a project is to have the numbers be wrong,” he said. “It’s essential to have almost a six-sigma view on how you look at data.”
Technological Foundations for Resilience
Dineen underscored the need for agile digital cores that enable organizations to respond flexibly to evolving business conditions. However, he cautioned against idealizing transformations, explaining that benefits often accrue over time rather than appearing overnight. “We tend to think of transformations as finished products, but it’s the incremental improvements that deliver value in the long run,” he said.
Another major factor in maintaining value post-implementation, according to Dineen, is data governance. “Your data needs to be rock-solid from day one, but if processes continue to break due to bad behaviors or poor data governance, your project is going to regress,” he noted. In his current role at NBCU, Dineen has organized a dedicated team to ensure data quality throughout every phase of transformation. “We’ve learned from the past that strong data governance can make or break the success of a project.”
Lessons from the Trenches
Reflecting on the ups and downs of transformation, Dineen acknowledged that resilience is one of the most valuable qualities in a successful initiative. “Transformations are tough—they need to be resilient enough to weather changes in business climates, leadership, and even acquisitions,” he said.
Dineen also encouraged project leaders to set realistic expectations with their board and senior leadership. “If you don’t have their attention before these projects, you surely will when you ‘go live’ and it doesn’t play out the way you want. You are better off fighting that battle to get in front of them right now, early, before you have to do it later on,” he advised.
Dineen’s advice is rooted in pragmatic considerations, with an eye on sustaining momentum over the long term. “If we’re not selling performance and resilience, we’re leaving money and potential on the table,” he explained. Transformations, Dineen reflected, are not just about making processes efficient; they’re about positioning companies to lead, to win, and to outperform.
Dineen recently joined NBCUniversal to lead a full-scale digital transformation project. Prior to NBCU, he was the Corporate CIO and Transformation Office Leader at the Nielsen Company where he led Nielsen’s recent SAP S/4HANA journey. Before Nielsen, Dineen held senior sales and marketing leadership roles at Quaero, CSG, USDATA, Claritas and Equifax.