“Digital transformation“ may be the business world’s biggest buzzword, but not everyone is sure what it actually means. As Salesforce explains in a highly informative online paper, digital transformation doesn’t focus on technology per se but, rather, addresses the way people and business are using innovations to do things differently – whether they are organizing work processes or interacting with customers. The paper provides an excellent overview for everyone who wants to have a concrete understanding of the ubiquitously used phrase.
Digital transformation fundamentally changes the way businesses operate.
Digital transformation doesn’t merely refer to the adoption of new technology. Hence, it differs from the two stages of technological development that preceded it: digitization and digitalization. Digitization shifted business processes from analog to digital, enabling organizations to become more efficient at what they were already doing. As a next step, digitalization enabled businesses to simplify established processes, such as retrieving data or customer records. Yet as these new technologies became more mainstream and sophisticated, people started to imagine new ways of using them to take business processes and customer interactions to a new level – or even to create new types of businesses. Digital transformation offers an unlimited array of opportunities for businesses – provided that companies are able to recognize and take advantage of a new technology’s potential to create value. For example, take Netflix: Starting out as a DVD mail-order business, it shifted to offering video streaming services once the technology became available. The company has kept evolving in parallel ...
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