Wherever I go if it is a conference or a launch of technical solutions or read somewhere, all talk about digitalization as the solution to all challenges. I have even seen and heard; digitalize or die?? Where is this coming from and what is it all about?
In my small world this is about change in the matter of new ways of getting a job done. Where it is possible to automate a “needed” process, make it happen, but where it is not natural to do, leave it alone.
I have spent a lot of my working years in a business that have had to think about automating as much as possible of the end to end service delivery between multiple categories of customers, partners, competitors and others here being dumps of “data” as an example. I guess from a tech perspective I have had my understanding of how a technical “process” can be automated based on an end-to-end understanding on how-to, and then do!
Back to the first lines in this post I believe that to understand what digitalization is for let´s say the public service offering in Norway, someone need to understand that the use of data is about change. It is not about launching an app or some webpage where existing manual process is just put on the Internet. It is actually about a serious work-through of how an existing process can be made more efficient using “stupid” computers and maybe along the change path some propriatorey “old-time-systems” can be turned off.
In my “simple” world this huge topic is about people and the use of computers to help do the parts of a process computers are much better “skilled” at making a difference. Taking examples from industries that have been working on automation and constant change for many years and “steal” from their results. The best part of walking this path is that one might avoid all the mistakes made while implementing what I and Gartner call digitalization.
regards
bj