In this article I would like to think about a meaningful definition for the word “Digital”. A word, we use so often in very different contexts, but most of the times I would say we don’t really know what we talk about – especially when we start to combine it with other words. E.g.:
- Digital Marketing
- Digital Transformation
- Digital Disruption
- Digitalization
- Digital Workplace
Many more buzzwords could be listed here but all these words do not have any value if we are not really clear what they mean.
Wikipedia defines Digital in the following way:
Digital usually refers to something using digits, particularly binary digits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital
This is very broad and could apply to basically everything we do today and it doesn’t help us to describe digital in the way we use it to describe what happens in our world today. New start ups just appear all of a sudden and become billion dollar publicly listed companies. Services, based on connected technologies and radical, customer value driven business models like Whats app, Uber, Airbnb disrupt large established industries by influencing peoples behaviors and priorities. We all know that most of us sleep with their cell phone “always on and connected” next to their bed. If our house is about to burn down, many of us think of rescuing their mobile phone first.
If we talk about a context like marketing technology or how technology disrupts markets, we need a more precise definition of what we mean by digital. Only then we can talk about buzzwords like digital transformation or digital disruption in a meaningful way.
Michael Wade came up with some definitions which I think are very helpful and determine pretty well what we mean if we talk about digital. In his book the Digital Vortex, he defines it as follows: Digital is the convergence of multiple technology innovations enabled by connectivity. The most important innovations by today include Big data, Analytics, Cloud computing, Mobility solutions, Location based services, Social media, Collaborative applications, Connected devices, Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI) .
I personally think we still should be more concrete. Therefore I would slightly rephrase the definition above by saying “Digital describes the connectivity between
- people and people
- people and things
- people and services
- things and services
- services and services”
Always enabled through technology innovations, based on the internet. The convergence of multiple technology innovations on its own, has no value. The value comes through connection and the exchange of data and value. No matter about what innovations we talk – we talk about their value, their threats, their potentials and their outcomes – this is required for being relevant in the context Marketing Technology or digital disruption.
Read more about digital disruption in my following articles:
