Caspar Herzberg |
This article first appeared in the
Winter 2017 issue of The Record.
Digitisation, or digital transition, has been an ongoing process of taking analogue information such as paper documents and converting them into digital formats such as web pages, online catalogues or electronic papers. Simply put, digitisation is converting anything into digits. This has benefitted industries like education, medicine, mass communication and more because it allows companies to handle documents more efficiently.
Nonetheless, many businesses tend to only digitise data when there is so much more potential to realise. Technology such as the internet of things, mobile and web applications, cloud computing and artificial intelligence are empowering organisations to completely digitally transform their business and processes.
Unfortunately, business adoption and understanding of easily accessible transformational tools is extremely poor. Organisations need to take the opportunity to move away from ‘stop the world’ implementation and change processes, instead identifying agile platforms to allow them to work towards delivering solutions in weeks, not years. And with a worldwide developer shortage, they also need to use platforms that are flexible and easy to configure, that can dynamically change to support market conditions and also support independent growth and change for different business silos.
Consideration also needs to be given around domain expertise. Often this lies within people rather than process – a huge limiting factor for businesses looking to digitally transform.
Technologies such as KnowledgeKube empower organisations in their quest for true digital transformation by providing rapid dynamic solutions and the ability to digitise specific domain expertise. Many enterprises that attempt digital transformation fail because of implementing mass standalone initiatives without an overall strategy. This results in a failure to identify all dependencies, duplication of effort, missed deadlines and ultimately an unsuccessful programme. This needn’t be the case, by utilising the unparalleled connectivity of KnowledgeKube, these initiatives can be joined together putting programmes back on the path to success.
Companies like Mercato Solutions aim to reframe people’s understanding of how digital transformation works. From small businesses to large enterprises, all need to reshape, redesign and reinvent their current processes for success in the new digital environment. It’s simply not enough to just create electronic versions of your paper documents. The crux of digital transformation is addressing the pain points and using technology like KnowledgeKube to solve these issues.
Simon O’Carroll is marketing director at Mercato Solutions