Demystifying Digital
Digital is the buzzword de rigueur these days. Just look at all its compounds - digital disruption, digital business, digital innovation, digital native, going digital, digital strategy.
Digital has our collective attention.
But what does it mean? Should we (by which I mostly mean enterprise architects) pay it much attention? Is it just today's version of the "information super highway"? Is it a McGuffin, giving form to existing impulses, moving the next chapter of the story along? Or is "digital" a real thing?
Oh it's a thing alright.
But overloading an existing word, "digital", and qualifying it in opposition to "physical" is most unfortunate. It has led to bad metaphors, vague generalisations, and worse..... adjectives!!
So let's be prosaic for a moment and describe digital without resorting to adjectives.
Capital D digital is the mediation and automation of our activity by computers.
"Digital" means using computers to mediate and automate things.
Mediation and automation are not new. Think writing, telephony, sewing machines and tractors.
It may seem that computers add an extra (magical) ingredient - decision making - to the mix. That's mostly true, but not what brought us to the point where 'revolution' isn't hyperbole.
The Digital Revolution: An unevenly distributed future.
What made digital a big deal is how cheap, common, powerful and connected computers have become.
That ubiquity has brought us to a point where a difference in quantity becomes a difference in kind.
The list of activities now made more effective by mediation and automation is long and impressive. We can put digital in front of science, commerce, medicine, art, government, manufacturing, transport and much more. Up close the effect on each domain of activity is profound. But taken together the effect is genuinely revolutionary. And it has only just started.
Digital Disruption: Now it's your turn.
When the conversation turns to talk of digital disruption it is usually about the effect of mediation and automation on organisations.
That is also a real thing.
All the things digital lets us do have reset the scarcities that define economies and justify industries. Organisations of all kinds are trying to adapt to new economic realities.
Inside the organisations the pressure of the digital revolution has led to an unexpected plot-twist...
For years IT departments have worked with the assumption that considerable effort must be applied to ensuring technology met the needs of their organisations.
Now, whole organisations are being required to align themselves to technology.
Strange days indeed.
