Digital Business Isn't Just Digitization

As I talk to people about digital business it is clear many are struggling at the first hurdle.  Most often they simply can't define 'digital'.  As a result they default to a position that it is synonymous with 'web' or 'e-commerce'.  While these may (or may not) be elements of your digital future, they are not, on their own, what you're grappling with.

Digital business is about looking at business through a whole new lens. It doesn't accept today's way  of doing things as satisfactory. It doesn't simply automate today's processes, but rather renders many of them obsolete while creating new business models and operating environments.  It challenges all that has gone before by challenging the very core of your organisation's belief's and assumptions.

The computerised automation of otherwise analogue processes is best likened to 'digital industrialisation'. As  with the advent  of production lines, all digital industrialisation does is 'standardise' the process, hopefully with some efficiency gain.

This kind of automation is based on the notion of scientific management, espoused by Frederick Taylor in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  Taylor was all about time and motion studies, finding the best way to do something, then having all workers do it this 'standardised' way.  He believed that the lower skilled and less educated workforce was incapable of planning work so he created the division of labour, and the separation of the planning (management) and execution (workers) functions.

This is not the world we operate in today. Instead we have a highly educated workforce that is driven by much more than just having 'a job at the mill for the next 40 years'.  Our organisations' customers and employees want innovation and flexibility like no other generation before. 

How digital impacts your business may not be known yet, but there are 2 things you must not do:

1. Don't think for a moment that automation is all you need to do;
2. Don't pretend change isn’t coming. 

Planning for the future based on what you know and see today will only set you up for failure.

After all, it was only 1977 when Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corporation (since acquired by Compaq, who in turn were purchased by HP) famously said,  "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."