Digital Transformation is a buzzword and as such you will find a wide range of explanations out there, yet there is in fact no widely agreed definition.
Since the arrival of the internet as a force in the mid-nineties, I and millions like me around the globe have engaged in finding new ideas and turning them into systems with the aim of harnessing the possibilities provided by the internet to improve performance for governments and corporations.
- The main areas where businesses are harnessing the digital age are:
Selling stuff, not just via eCommerce, but using social media and advertising to generate leads and CRM type tools to manage and maintain relationships with customers. Underpinning all this of course is the acute need to have the strategy right before starting - Making processes more efficient and cheaper to maintain and execute through flexible and home working, BYOD, re-designed processes based on sound operating principals and business strategies.
- Generating more accurate and broader information to support business decisions
- Agility to acquire and dispose of businesses with lower overhead for integration and communication.
There are many other business issues that can be addressed as part of a digital transformation drive, but in all cases the crucial part is understanding how your business is affected and getting the strategy right before proceeding to digital strategy and digital architecture
The “Explained series” is planned to build into a trustworthy collection of explanations and commentaries that can be trusted to tell the story straight without any bias and attempt to make the subjects accessible to the layman. The latter is not always easy as some of these terms refer to genuinely complex subject matter, while others are simply too vague to pin down (there’s another word for that). There is also a limit to how far I can go in explaining every term when there are a lot of them, so I have to sometimes rely on your initiative to right click the offending word and look it up.
If you want an answer on something and you can’t find it easily, please use the comments section to just ask and I will appreciate not having to research the next topic.