Digitization: It’s an Evolution and not a Transformation
History Has Shown That Digitization Is More Evolution Than Revolution.
Some people say one should not look behind. The past is gone, and you cannot change it anymore. Well, that’s true and it is indeed the right attitude to look into the future because this is the only place where you can change things and introduce innovation. However, I am on the opinion that it is important to consider what has happened in the past. It is significant to understand why things happened and to learn from it, in order to avoid and overcome mistakes from others and thus make things better in the future.
As a technology analyst, I am frequently in touch with CEOs, CIOs and other decisions makers from organizations of any size. During advisory sessions and workshops, digitization is the hot topic to discuss for the last 5+ years. However, after a short period of time, the majority of decision makers start defending themselves, claiming their organization is already digital for quite some time. They are digital by providing their employees with software applications, desktop computers, smartphones, tablet computers or running networks of servers and so on. Well, on the one hand they are right. On the other hand, they express that they did not understand what digitization really means today. And thus, why companies like Amazon, Google, Alibaba and so on are out of their sight and far ahead of the competition. However, the success of Google, Amazon, etc., are no overnight success stories but took at least 10 years or even longer. And this is why it is so important to consider what has happened in the past. Hint: Amazon was only a web shop some years ago. Now, it has multiple business units and is still growing by experiments and just tries if something potentially works.
Considering that in my opinion the term “digital transformation” is misleading. It is a digital evolution; every organization worldwide is faced with for already a long time. Based on my ongoing experiences above, I decided to write this piece to unveil the broken mindset of the old economy, by getting a wrong understanding of digitization and underestimating the impact of information technology (IT) and digital technologies for the business.
All in all, digitization is nothing new and has changed its face over the last decades. Digitization today is completely different from digitization in the 1980s or the 1950s when the first microprocessor hit the market. However, the digital evolution has every organization over a barrel. And each company needs the necessary fundamentals in order to adapt this ongoing progress and achieve change inside the entire organization.
Read the entire article at AnalystPOV.com.
