Do you know what is digital transformation? You've already heard of the term "digital transformation," but you don't know what is digital transformation?

The definition of digital transformation

Digital transformation is the process of using digital technologies to create or modify new business processes, culture, and customer experiences to meet changing business and market requirements. In other words, it is the reimagining of business in the digital age.

It transcends traditional roles such as sales, marketing, and customer service. Instead, digital transformation starts and ends with how you think of and interact with customers. As we move from paper to spreadsheets to smart applications to run our business, we have an opportunity to reimagine how we do our business - how we engage our customers - with digital technology on our part for small businesses that are just starting to set up and transform your business processes later.

You can future-proof your organization from the word go. Building the 21st-century project on handwritten notebooks is not sustainable. Thinking, planning, and building digitally sets you up to be agile, flexible, and ready to grow.

As digital transformation begins, many companies take a step back to ask whether they are really doing the right things. Keep reading for answers

Before considering  hows and what's of transforming your business and what happens, we first need to answer a fundamental question: how have we gone from paper and pencil record-keeping to the world-changing business of digital technology?

What’s the difference between digitization, and digital transformation?

Not long ago, companies kept records on paper. Whether handwritten in the ledgers or printed in the documents, business data was analog. If you wanted to gather or share information, you dealt with physical documents - papers and binders, xeroxes, and faxes.

Computers proliferated, and most companies began converting all those ink-on-paper records into digital computer files. This is called digitization: the process of converting analog information into digital. Finding and sharing information is much easier than ever, but the ways companies use their new digital records largely mimic old analog methods. Computer operating systems are designed around file folder ICONS to make them feel familiar and less intimidating to new users. Digital data was significantly more efficient for companies than its counterpart, but business systems and processes were largely designed around the ideas of the analog age and about how to find, share, and use information.

The role of digital data in your work

Think about customer service, whether retail, field operations, or the call centre. The digital transformation process changed the service forever by making customer records easily and quickly retrievable via the computer. The basic methodology of customer service has not changed, but sending a query, searching for the relevant data, and providing a solution has become more efficient when searching paper books by just tapping your computer screen or mobile phone.

The process of using digital information to make working methods simpler and more efficient is called digitization. Note the word placed in this definition: Digitization does not mean changing the way you do work or creating new types of work. It's about going on, but much faster and much better now that your data can be accessed instantly and not locked in a filing cabinet somewhere in a dusty archive.

As digital technology evolved, people began to generate ideas to use business technology in new ways, not just to do old things faster. This is the time when the idea of digital transformation is taking shape. With new technologies, new things - and new ways of doing them - were suddenly possible.