Digitization accelerates its pace. Or should I say digitalization? That is not a play on words - which one we use depends on how daring we are in foreseeing the future.

Popular versions of both definitions are too restrictive, to say the least. They insist that digitization relate only to the process of converting physical information or signal into digital format, while digitalization - to technology processing digitally formatted information.

The above definitions raise serious questions.

What with non-physical information representing 90% of "digital fuel"? How can we bet on plain digital format triviality instead of a deep hierarchy of information modeling abstractions to drive digital technologies development? Do we deny the fundamental nature of digitization, especially in light of the AI hype?

The answer is simple. Evolution broke the process in question loose of the confines of archaic definitions. They were adequate 10 years ago when go-paper-less was a daring enterprise, now in an AI-honed world, they are not.

As Prof. Jordan P. Peterson stresses not once that definitions can't be relative, they are always absolute. Like glasses, they can make our vision of the business future sharp or blurry (keeping us stuck in the past).

Crenger.com uses only the digitization term with the following meaning.

Digitization is a way of knowledge generation and accumulation by creating new methods of information capturing, quantification, and storage.

It is a forward-looking definition that fills the void between information and knowledge. The "by creating..." clause sets digitization on the same level as science in terms of discovering laws, axioms, categories, and recurrence patterns.

Crenger.com's experience in digitizing desalination engineering and management may be captured by the following axioms. (An axiom is a truthful statement serving as a premise for further reasoning.)

#1

If we can't digitize our business, we don't understand it well enough. Information modeling (IM) using a holistic approach to business is a single point of entry into digitization. in IM, to understand business means to capture not only static relationships between information categories, but temporary ones needed to create the former. Relationships and categories form data semantics.

In other words, information categories and relationships mining is the essence of digitization.

#2

Digitization goes hand in hand with introducing new industry standards and practices - common ground for all competing businesses and a topic for open discussion in networks. Digitization educates the audience. The educated audience is quicker to embrace digitization.

Silent digitization - a common mistake of startups - does not exist.

#3

Digitization transforms a business into a partnership between the computer and the human being. The partnership is a virtuous circle of infinite growth: advances in technology mine new challenges and transform the human being's mindset. A new mindset creates a new perspective on challenges, potent with solutions.

Digitization is an infinite process.

#4

To make the partnership communication efficient, a single no-silo business space shall be created, governed by laws of information domains and human behavior. (The data silo term is applied to an information management system unable to exchange data with other similar systems.)

#5

The divide between the computer and the human being is the rising complexity level of decision-making. So the biggest silo of digitization is the ability of the human being to make critical decisions.

Digital HR management and business process management (BPM) are a pivot of digitization.

#6

Former services and products stop being a single destination; they fade in comparison with an explosion of opportunities created by super-fast communication.

Digitization creates a long-tail range of products and services where the former ones may account for less than 50% of revenues.

The long tail is a business strategy leading to significant profits rise by selling low volumes of hard-to-find items to many customers, instead of only selling large volumes of a reduced number of popular items. The term was first coined in 2004 by Chris Anderson, who turned it into a book titled "The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More". Examples of long-tail businesses are Amazon.com, Apple, Google, and Microsoft.

#7

The computer side is technologies tuned to specific domains of business. Technologies are not business-agnostic. Digital business cannot be assembled from software "parts" available on the market.

#8

Technology quality is defined by how well it fits the other technologies driving the business. Information interoperability - fitting criteria Number One - makes customization of popular software unattractive.

#9

The business technologies development is not started from scratch. They should inherit the best from what we use in everyday life - LinkedIn, Twitter, WhatsApp, etc. Inheritance needs coding at a deeper abstraction level. No-code digitization is a myth.

Digitization turns any company into an IT company. Networking and 100% remote work are starting points of digitization.

#10

Digitization turns business into ADAQ factory - condition for IIoT and AI explosion (ADAQ - any data acquisition)