Digitisation or Digitalisation? We settle the difference once and for all.

Due to the success of our IT Transformation Guide for Ambitious Businesses we felt we would spend a moment distinguishing the difference between two common buzzwords of the business dialect, Digitisation or Digitalisation?

Before the digital age, society operated with functional and material processes. A newspaper was your primary source of information. Now of course, you can access the news of the world at the click of a button. This is due to the digital revolution, a continuous evolving network. We can call the process of turning the analogue into the digital: Digitisation.

When digitalisation meets Stephen King

1. Digitisation is the conversion of changing the analogue to the digital. 

For example, changing bank statements that would traditionally be sent via mail into an app or digital format. Easy. Here’s a few more:

• Changing an article from a hand-written document to a digital copy
• Storing patient records on private computers instead of in material folders

Now that we are familiar with digitisation, what is digitalisation? The terms have been confused with one another countless times, let’s take a closer look.

2. Digitalisation is how this new digital world will impact people and work

I’ll explain. This is about sociality. For example, meetings held remotely by video conference; digitalisation has allowed us to bypass the logistics of getting everyone together in a meeting room, we can now talk together virtually while being in separate places. More examples are:

• self-service checkouts instead of a working cashier
• customers who shop online via ecommerce websites

So how does this apply to your business?

There are countless examples of organisations that got left behind because they did not adapt in time for the digital revolution. This remorseless and ever-changing sphere requires an IT solution that adapts and succeeds with change. Because digital is not going anywhere soon.

The challenge of digitisation is less in the reception of digital data, and more in knowing what to do with the data and how to respond to it. This is where digitalisation comes in. For industrial systems and others, digitalisation takes the form of connecting, processing, and reacting to data. A relatively recent example of digitalisation within the finance sector is the uprising of blockchain, underpinning digital currencies and automatically executed smart contracts. This idea of automation is a key component of digitalisation.

Effecting the Mid-Market

Mid-sized businesses are affected by both digitisation and digitalisation. They are big enough to have huge quantities of digital data of their own, not to mention the data available from customer interactions, social media, and other sources. However, they are often not big enough to hire data scientists to make sense of the data. Their systems, especially those put in place before growth happened, may not be expandable to cope with ever increasing amounts of data now coming their way. Understanding The Role of Digital Transformation in your Business can help you stay on top of the digital game.

“It’s imperative to have an IT solution that can adapt and succeed within an ever-evolving professional sphere.”

Likewise, plans for business expansion can be hampered by the limits of IT systems and networks bought previously for more modest needs. Small business solutions do not scale well to meet mid-sized needs. They lack manageability, flexibility in security, and possibilities to bring together data from different sources for analysis and business insights. Timico provide the complete IT solution for your business.

Key Considerations

Functionality, affordability, and adaptability are key considerations for mid-sized companies. These businesses must have future-proofed solutions that are also simple enough to manage, and secure enough to protect customer, employee and company data.

Want to read more? Read our FREE The IT Transformation Guide for Ambitious Businesses to find out the key considerations businesses should take in to account when considering digitisation or digitalisation.
Timico are leading providers of IT solutions for the Mid-Market.