• 31 / 1 / 2019

What to know before you start your company’s digital journey

Let’s start with laying the terms right. One thing to keep in mind is once the digital journey begins, each element in the digital chain is dependent on the previous one, i.e., digitalization cannot begin before the right extent of digitization; and digital transformation cannot happen without the right extent of digitalization and digital optimization. Moreover, the Digital Journey for one organization could be very different from that of another one – the digital journey for a consumer physical goods manufacturing company could be different from that of a media and entertainment company.

 

The position of your business in the digital journey is dictated by how you look at data (digital information) and if you implement ways to capitalize that to make your enterprise a data-driven business.
To understand a ‘digital journey’, it’s essential to look at few examples to understand how the terms are distinct from one another.

 

Digitization is creating a digital (bits and bytes) version of information that is originally in analog/physical form (paper documents, images, sounds etc.), so that it could be used by a computing system for processing, storing and sharing. This is where Microsoft SharePoint comes in place.

 

When many processes were digitized by managing them via applications, those applications made data digitally available for everyone, but still operated in silos. One thing to note is – if this data in silos is used only by the immediate silo owners to bring in process improvements, then you are not really performing digitalization yet. Digitalization would commence only when you further do two things simultaneously: 

 

  • Use digital data collectively’ from these distinct digitized processes for driving process improvements or optimization.
  • Use digital technologies to achieve these improvements/optimization.

 

Digitalization means use of digital technologies to access and leverage the digital information from across multiple systems and data points, to gain actionable insights that can lead to process optimization, productivity gains and pave the way for business transformation etc.

 

The Digital Journey of a business is determined by when and how a business moves from Digitization to Digitalization to Digital Optimization to Digital Transformation. Reach out to Strategix Enterprises to start your journey now!