Businesses today are increasingly investing in digital infrastructure to cut costs, enhance productivity and counter potential threats to their business continuity. The waves of the Covid-19 pandemic and resultant lockdowns have made it imperative for businesses to reduce their costs to sail through an unprecedented business environment.
Digital transformation in such a scenario is crucial to achieving agility and flexibility that businesses need to adapt quickly to unforeseen challenges. It involves preparing businesses for the challenges of tomorrow by thinking and planning through data-centric analysis.
Despite businesses taking a keen interest in innovative digital technologies and recognition of their competitive necessity, many are still baffled about how to leverage these opportunities to create a potent digital transformation strategy. Digitization and digitalization are often used interchangeably with digital transformation. Distinguishing between the three could go a long way in enabling businesses to make the most of digital transformation.
Let us explore how to differentiate between them.
Digitization
Digitization, in its most basic sense, can be explained by taking, for instance, the conversion of conventional paperwork to digital files or old vinyl records to a digital audio format. This extends to a broader spectrum such as legacy modernization or moving a system online. Non-digital things are converted into a digital format, which means that this information can now be used by a computer system.
This has led to a redefining collaboration by deploying cloud technology solutions, and smart analytics to generate insights and actionable knowledge to mitigate risk and promote the efficiency of future projects. Its biggest advantage is timely access, processing, transmission, and optimization of data.
Digitalization
Every business today has grown leaps and bound by unravelling its true potential and reshaping its brand value through digitalization. A precursor to digital transformation, it can influence and redefine product, service delivery, and people. Take, for instance, Avon India, a globally renowned company ruling the cosmetics world for decades decided to go digital. Through a well-aligned content strategy, Avon was quick to catch hold of the audiences’ attention. It realized that only youth-centric persuasive content could drive the desired brand engagement among millennials. Soon its social media presence crossed major milestones winning laurels and appreciation for the same.
Digital Transformation
Digital transformation enables businesses to establish and accelerate business activities, processes, competencies, and models. Businesses can fully leverage the changes, create new revenue opportunities, and impact society in a strategic and prioritized way.
The first and foremost thing to note in Digital Transformation is that it transcends beyond making better business decisions, delivering projects and enabling new business models. It empowers organisations to drive environmental enhancement, area regeneration and improve accessibility.
Digital transformation can provide the desired resilience to businesses, and by prioritizing the maximization of social value, it can drive necessary social transformation. As exceeding the consumers' expectations is the goal of any business, it offers agile solutions that help brands address business challenges and overcome barriers to growth. A professional digital agency can prove to be beneficial for brands in this endeavor and can help drive their overall growth and keep pace with the competition.
