If 10 years ago it was considered by many to be nothing more than a play on words, in the last 2 years the word digitalization has appeared increasingly often in Romanians’ search preferences, to the detriment of “digitization”. Are the two concepts better understood, or has there emerged a need to orient toward “digitalization” instead of “digitization” in these last years? Is something positive happening in Romanian society that would justify this trend?
According to Gartner Glossary , digitalization is „the use of digital technologies to change a business model and to provide new revenue and value-generating opportunities; it is the process of moving to a digital business.”
If digitization describes the conversion of physical/analog data into a digital format, digitalization describes the transformation of business processes into digital.
Digitalization goes beyond digitization, leveraging technology to completely transform a business’s processes — evaluating, redesigning and reimagining the way you do business. If digitization is a conversion of data, digitalization is a transformation of processes - as stated by truqcapp.com in the article Digitalization vs. digitalization: differences, definitions and examples.
Analyzing comparatively the search preference trend for the two terms, for Romania in the period 01.01.2016 - 19.02.2022, with the help of Google Trends, we obtain the following evolution:
A clear increase in interest in DIGITALIZATION is noted in these last two pandemic years, probably both due to “the digital transformation of the public administration” expected to be financed through PNRR and promoted by ADR (The Authority for the Digitalization of Romania). It is certain that all the older and newer controversies surrounding the Ministry of Digitalization and its plagiarist or mystic ministerial candidates have stimulated the popularity of Romanian “digitalization” to the detriment of “digitization”.
Perhaps a minister of digitalization with the expertise of Bozhidar Bozhanov (Minister of e-Government in Bulgaria) - included in the top 100 contributors open source in the world, would change many things, compared to the traditional “Romanian specificity” - still so popular.
DIGITALIZATION - of interest in Bucharest and in 6 counties
The source of interest for “digitalization”, is found only in the 7 “subregions” presented by Google Trends through the counties of Ilfov, Brasov, Cluj, Timiș, Prahova, Iași and the capital city. In conclusion, we need to do more ourselves in the private sector through our own initiatives to promote digitalization not only as terminology used in everyday speech, but especially through concrete steps taken in the digitalization of important activities / processes within businesses.
eMIP Platform, is one of the examples of involvement in this transformation, which we want to be as deep as possible and with immediate results. The way in which we are involved in being part of this, we will present in future posts.