Hard on the heels of Mike Bracken’s pithy definition of digital transformation comes this longer post, exploring multiple meanings of digital through an extended metaphor of running a café. The two don’t contradict each other, but what this longer account draws out is that what counts as digital improvement is different at different stages of organisational and technical development. It offers nine questions to which digital is the answer, or is at least part of it. The eighth is organisational design and transition:
If I were to design the organisation again today, from scratch, how would I design it, based on the new needs and expectations people have, and how the wider context we are in is also changing?”
That comes pretty close to Mike’s one liner – which is a reminder both that digital change isn’t necessarily transformational and that digital as an unqualified descriptor doesn’t describe anything very precisely, a point further emphasised by Anthony Zacharzewski’s tongue in cheek tweet in response:
Digital is Facebook, right?