Do We Need Digital?
Nowadays, it feels like everything is digital. But is it?
There’s an old joke: One fish asks another fish, “Hey, how’s the water?” And the second fish responds, “Water? What the heck is water?”
I’ve been getting a question a lot lately on podcasts and interviews. The question is: “Do we even need the term “digital”l anymore?” After all, at this point, isn’t everything digital? Why are we even still talking about the term digital?
I was reading a book this weekend that I want to recommend to you. It’s Tom Goodwin’s Digital Darwinism. There’s a long discussion in that book about the history of electricity. There was a time when electricity was new, and every company had a vice president of electricity. The term electrification was a big deal.
Businesses back then needed to go through the process of electrification. The question was, has your factory been electrified? In other words, has it been transformed into a business that operates on electricity instead of steam, coal, a water wheel in the river, or whatever they were doing before electricity?
We’ve now reached a point where we no longer talk about whether a business is an electric business or not because electricity is everywhere.
So, is that where we are with digital?
I recently went to the doctor’s office, and I had to fill out endless paperwork. I wrote my name, address, and other information about myself, four different times.
I was applying for a mortgage a couple of years ago and received a big, thick packet in the mail. I had to find the little “Sign Here” stickers that I had to sign over and over.
Even my tax returns. There are ways to file digital tax returns, but if your tax return is of a certain complexity level, no way. Every year I get piles of tax returns to sign.
I recently ordered from a major online retailer and realized I’d made a mistake. I wanted to return it but couldn’t return it on the website, so I called the call center. “Oh, sorry,” they said. “You just recently purchased it. Systems haven’t synchronized. Can’t make that return yet.”
About a year ago, I had a speaking engagement in Paris, and I was leaving from Charles de Gaulle Airport to come back to New York. I almost didn’t get out of the country. Why? Because the entry visa on my passport wasn’t stamped forcefully enough. They couldn’t clearly read the date that I had entered France.
Of course, I’m thinking, does it matter? Guys, I’m leaving. Here’s my ticket. Don’t you have computer records of this? I was delayed for 90 minutes and almost missed my flight because they couldn’t read a blurry stamp on my passport.
So, no, we are not at the point where digital is everywhere, folks. We are in a transformation process right now. We are partway there, but we are not in the ninth inning of this transformation. We are at best a third of the way through.
I think we might as well keep using this term digital or digital transformation. Maybe you want to call it digitization or digitalization — I don’t care what word you use, but let’s not jump ahead of the bandwagon. We are not at the point where we can say everything’s digital, and we don’t need this term anymore.
That’s what I think. What do you think? Let me know in the comments. Am I right? Should we still be talking about digital, or have we passed that point, and everything is digital, so there’s no more need to talk about it?
In my new book, Winning Digital Customers, I talk about the role of digital transformation for businesses today and why it’s critical to winning the love of customers, which is so essential to success. Today you can download the first chapter of that book for FREE right here https://WDC.HT/Chapter. I encourage you to check it out.
#digital #digitalinnovation #digitization #digitaltransformation
