Watch your (digital) language!
Although often used synonymously, the terms digitisation, digitalisation and digital transformation can be understood differently. When undertaking digital change initiatives, you need to be mindful of the language you use or risk creating confusion and misunderstanding.
Introducing a new digital technology into a business is as much about change management as it is project management. Key to success is that the initiative is clearly communicated to those involved in the design, implementation, and use. Despite this, often we fail to appreciate the implications of describing a change as a digitisation, digitalisation, or digital transformation project.
Although there are no universally recognised definitions, it is generally accepted that digitisation involves the turning of analogue into a digital format and digitalisation involves a change of process to incorporate digital technologies. At the extreme, digital transformation would involve whole business transformation (ref Digitize, digitalize, digital transformation | BSI (bsigroup.com).
Given this, if you worked in an organisation which announced that it was digitising, you might perceive the potential consequences as completely different to if they were about to embark on a digital transformation initiative. Consequently, your response and support for the initiative might be impacted.
Why are digitisation, digitalisation and digital transformation often used incorrectly? Although without evidence, it is reasonable to assume that there would be two main reasons: lack of awareness that the terms are different, or the desire to present the initiative as something different (and probably grander) than it is.
What do we would suggest?
To avoid unnecessary confusion when embarking on a digitalisation initiative, create a glossary and define the key terms. Within the Centre the definitions we use for digitisation, digitalisation and digital transformation are shown below. These are not the only ones we could have selected – rather than trying to find a universally agreed definition (which would be difficult, if not impossible), what is important is that members of the team have a shared understanding of what the terms mean within the context of the project.
Digitisation
“Digitisation is the encoding of analogue information into a digital format”
Peter C. Verhoef, Thijs Broekhuizen, Yakov Bart, Abhi Bhattacharya, John Qi Dong, Nicolai Fabian, Michael Haenlein, Digital transformation: A multidisciplinary reflection and research agenda, Journal of Business Research, Volume 122, 2021, Pages 889-901,
Digitalisation
“Digitalisation refers to enabling or improving processes by leveraging digital technologies and digitized data.”
What is Digitization, Digitalization, and Digital Transformation | ARC Advisory (arcweb.com)
Digital Transformation
"Digital transformation is the process of integrating digital technologies into all areas of a company’s business model to fundamentally alter how customer value is created and delivered. It involves changing business processes, the company's value chain, its business model, organisational culture, and customer experiences”
https://www.igi-global.com/chapter/digital-transformation/299771"
Additional Resources
Author’s profile
Dr Susan Lattanzio is the Research and Industry Engagement Manager for the Made Smarter Innovation: Centre for People-Led Digitalisation. Her research focuses on the use of transdisciplinary approaches which bring together different academic disciplines and non-academic stakeholders in order to solve real-world problems.
If you would like to know more about this research, please email p-ld@bath.ac.uk.
