What is Digital?

pic from continuuminnovation.com

“Digital” is a term which has been talked around since past few years. And yet, when I spoke with folks in “digital” teams, I ended up getting vague answers. It seemed to me be a loaded and misleading term. To me the first computer was no less digital than the smartphones and tablets of today. It’s still 0s and 1s finally. It has not changed, since the first computer. It did not change through the internet revolution, and my guess would be, it’s not going to change in the near future.

So what then is Digital?

During one of our corporate HRD sessions, a gentleman introduced me to method of analysis — historical method. Look at how things evolved to the current state, what were the forces which shaped the journey of the concept from the beginning to the time of analysis.

Applying this approach, I condensed the historical progress to four significant events.

• The Internet — The internet created an information superhighway, which could spread to the nooks and corners of the world, hitherto unheard of. It started with a purpose of sharing information to making international boundaries fluid for doing commerce. For a business, potentially, the entire world became the market.
• Cloud Computing — Cloud Computing lowered the entry barrier for a small businesses, with a quick and a cost effective means for bootstrapping a business with IT infrastructure, thereby shrinking the time for concept to go to market. It has expanded system boundaries beyond the firewalls of an organization.
• Smartphones — Smartphones moved computing power from the desk to the palm of one’s hand. It made computing power available on the move. Commerce can could be done from anywhere.
• Social Network — The success of Facebook, twitter and WhatsApp have connected the world connected the world building communities across. They have become an excellent source for creating awareness of products and services to large communities.

Along with these events, there were several developments, which have been happening,

• User expectations have continued to grow ahead of what technology can offer in terms of responsiveness. I remember when we first go access to the internet on a dial up connection, we were more than happy to wait for minutes together for the pages to load. Today, world over, across all cultures, are expecting responses in milliseconds.
• Computing power became inexpensive and more and more capacity can be packed in the same chip. This has enabled the development of in-memory databases and caches which help in achieving drastic increases in responsiveness of applications.
• Where RFID failed, IoT seems to be succeeding. Wearable devices, sensors and various other devices are picking steam, slowly but surely. This is going to lead to an explosion of data. Gigabytes are passe. We have to increasingly deal with terabytes and petabytes.
• The internet network costs are coming down and bandwidths have significantly increased enabling rich voice and video content to be streamed across.
• The increase in voice and video content has in turn triggered significant advances in natural language processing applications and libraries.

All the above events and developments have contributed significantly to increasing the velocity, volume and variety of information. We have to increasing grapple with a deluge of information. I would then define “Digital” as not a technology or a set of technologies; for lack of a better definition, Digital is a state of evolution we are in — a state where,

• there are going to be billions of sources of information, which we can potentially sense, derive insights and respond to or simply ignore (at our own peril).
• search is going to be significant, as searching for relevant information is literally going to be searching for a needle in a humongous haystack.
• voice and video will slowly replace or significantly overshadow text as the primary source of user input
• applications would have to become cognitive to handle the accelerated rate of change. Machines will increasingly match wits with men.
• security is going to be a huge concern, as an organization’s IT boundaries will not be restricted within its firewalls.

Digital is a state, which is going to bring in enormous opportunities and equally enormous challenges, to our systems, and our ways of living. Digital transformation is then, an attempt to change our methods and machines to respond to this state.