Stefan pointed to an interesting blog post this morning on Twitter, that states that the word ‘digital’ is becoming increasingly less useful over time:
I haven’t yet come up with a better word to replace “digital”. I’ve tried a few, but they have their own problems. There’s simply too much meaning packed in for it to be captured in a single word.
This is true of the word digital, but also many other words. Transformation is another good example. And let’s not get started on ‘customer’.
The working definition of ‘digital’ that I carry around in my head is digital = change + the internet. It works for me, in my context, but of course others don’t always see things the same way.
I’ve tried other ways of breaking it down with people to understand their expectations. One was a three way split:
- Digital access – taking a paper or telephone based process and whacking it online with an e-form (quick to do, few benefits except a bit of convenience for web savvy users)
- Digital efficiency – taking that process and digitising it end to end, involving the replacement or integration with back office systems, removing unnecessary admin touch points an so on (takes longer, more difficult, but yields better results)
- Digital transformation – taking an entire service and rethinking it from the ground up, knowing what we know about networks and connectivity (really hard, but could ensure the relevance of that service for the next 20 years).
This too is flawed, and by it’s nature most people would always opt for the middle one.
Of course, the current fad for digital transformation is just that – what we are talking about is technology enabled change, and the approach to doing that well really hasn’t changed much in a couple of decades. Understand your service in terms of where you add value and design an operating model to suit, re-engineer your processes to work well from a customer or user’s point of view, and then choose the best technology to run that process on.
The detail may change, and the tools and techniques might differ, but it’s basically the same thing, whatever we are calling it this week. Sometimes though you have to use the buzzwords to get people to listen to you – and perhaps that isn’t such a hardship, really.