Digital Transformation Series｜Three small illustrations to understand in seconds that "digital transformation" is not just about digitization!

The word "digital" is widely used now. What's the difference between digitally related words like "digitalization" and "digital transformation"? If businesses are to successfully implement digital transformation, they must first understand what these terms mean.

HoliBear - Digital Transformation

The word "digital" is widely used now, but what does it really mean? There are many words associated with "digital", such as "digitalization" and "digital transformation", are these the same? In addition, digitization and digitalization, these two words are uniformly translated into "digitization" in Chinese, but are these the same concept?

We use three illustrations to illustrate the difference between these concepts and their scope of application in the enterprise.

Digitization of information

This refers to converting physical information into an electronic format . For example, the difference between physical books and the current popular e-books, or the newspapers that every household subscribed to in the past, are now turned into online news sites. These are all examples of information digitization.

Digitilization of technology

Digitalizaion, we call it "Technology Digitization".

The main purpose is to use digital technology or methods to improve the business model or customer experience of the enterprise . For example, The New York Times New York Times, with the advancement of technology, has created a new business model and provided customers with more diverse experience methods, including movies, broadcasts, and even future VR applications. The New York Times hopes to increase visibility, reach more users, and increase subscriptions through the "digitization" of businesses and products.

Digital Transformation

Digital transformation is a large-scale digital application in an enterprise. It needs to rely on the integration of different departments in the enterprise. It may be applied to employee recruitment, business processes, and technology use. The purpose of digital transformation is to unify disparate digital projects into a more meaningful and effective business strategy.

Going back to the example of the New York Times just now, the company has redefined itself as a company that prioritizes digitalization in recent years. From 2011 to 2016, the number of digital subscriptions increased by 418%, and in 2020, it also successfully reached 8 billions of dollars in digital revenue. The reason why The New York Times can beat other competitors in the industry is that they not only come up with many digital concepts, but can also integrate them all into a "digital transformation strategy."

We can see that "information digitization", "technology digitization" and "digital transformation" have a logical sequence. As an enterprise leader, if you want to implement digital transformation well, you must first understand the meaning of these words, so as to lay the foundation for the success of enterprise digital transformation.

To learn more about digital transformation, see Grupo's successful transformation story .