DiDIY and Digitization
The advent of recent digital technologies (both hardware and software) is disrupting business models of traditional companies enabling a so-called “digital transformation”. A concept related to this changing environment is the digitization of processes: “taking manual or offline business processes and converting them to online, networked, computer-supported processes”. Digitization is playing a vital role also given that technologies are becoming democratized. Democratization is “the process by which access to technology rapidly continues to become more accessible to more people. New technologies and improved user experiences have empowered those outside of the technical industry to access and use technological products and services”. Digital technologies such as Mobile, 3D printers or Internet-of-Things (IoT) technologies are creating potential avenues of value that can be exploited by companies independently from the industry or the products they produce. Moreover, they have the power to unlock supply and demand, create new business models, improve work processes, and reduce costs and risks in a digitally disrupted world.
The impact of this transformation is both at a strategic level and at an operational one. Therefore, workers, managers and executives have to adapt and reshape their activities in order to exploit the opportunities deriving from such a big change. First, they should understand how to digitally advance their skills (coordination, collaboration, people management among all) in order to fill the gap generated by the introduction of these new digital technologies. Second, they should understand how to create best practices out of the usage of recent digital technologies in different industries and business units. Third, the knowledge generated should be exchanged both inside and outside of the company boundaries with the aim to generate opportunities for a continuous process optimization.
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