Whenever I meet a client these days, I’m always asked the same thing. How can we leverage digital technologies for our business? Irrespective of the industry or business you are in, you’ve probably heard the word “Digitisation” a lot. Since COVID-19, digitisation has been on an upward trajectory. But what exactly is digitisation? Is it just having a website or mobile app or is it more than that?
To understand digitisation correctly, let’s have a clear understanding of the term digital technology. In very simple and plain language, digital technologies are the systems, devices, or resources that process data electronically.
Take, for instance, the following simple example. Instead of saving records of all of your employees in a diary or notebook, you save it on a pen drive or on a cloud server or on your local machine (PC/laptop). Now, as the data is stored electronically, you can use or create your own bespoke software to implement an employee management system. This might help bring a lot of automation in terms of your employee’s attendance, salary, workflows or project progress, notifications and whatnot.
In the above example, if you notice, we didn’t stop at just storing data electronically. Rather, we went forward to create an employee management system. The process of creating this employee management system is nothing but digitalisation. So digitisation and digitalisation mostly go hand in hand. Well that’s confusing, right? In simple terms, you can say the first is the way of storing data, while the latter is the way of processing it or using it. Better?
The interesting thing about digitisation is that it has taken root in almost every sector. Marketing and sales, finance, e-commerce, tourism, media, telecom and so on. If you ask me, the main reason is “data”. As data is stored electronically, almost everything has become possible. Combined with the power of emerging technologies – artificial intelligence, Internet-of-Things, blockchain and the cloud – digital technologies have become very advanced.
Every coin has two sides: digital technologies are no exception and have their own pros and cons along with some challenges. The main challenge is, you guessed it, cyber security. When it comes to software and digital records, nothing is 100% secure. However, with proper measures and implementations, the majority of cyber attacks can be avoided. There is a reason why companies are ready to pay a six-figure salary to cyber security experts.
Well, that’s a digitisation and digital technologies in a nutshell. Hope you enjoyed reading it :)