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Digital transformation of the EU: what does it mean?
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As the need for digitalization increases, people are inclined to improve their digital skills.
With regard to digital skills, 56% of EU residents have at least basic digital skills. The data shows a slight increase in ICT specialists in employment: in 2020, the EU had 8.4 million ICT specialists compared to 7.8 million in 2019. Having in mind that 55% of enterprises reported difficulties in recruiting ICT specialists in 2020, this lack of employees with advanced digital skills is a contributing factor towards the slower digital transformation of organizations in many EU member states.
According to the Harvard Business Review, digital transformation is the process of using digital technologies to create new — or modify existing — business processes, culture, and customer experiences to meet changing business and market requirements. This reimagining of business in the digital age is digital transformation.
It transcends traditional roles as if it focuses on how one thinks about, and engages with customers. Paper is being replaced by spreadsheets, which help smart applications in managing everyone’s way of doing business. People have the chance to reimagine how they organize their wor and how they engage with customers with the assistance of modern day technology.
As digital technology changes people’s lives, the EU’s digital strategy aims to make this transformation work for people and businesses, while helping to achieve its target of a climate-neutral Europe by 2050.
European Commission is determined to make this Europe’s “Digital Decade”. Europe must now strengthen its digital sovereignty and set standards with a clear focus on data, technology, and infrastructure.
It can be challenging and even problematic when entities decide to embarks the digital transformation agenda without having a clear definition or vision. The fundamental meaning of digital transformation is not about replacing old technologies with new ones, capturing high volumes of data, hiring an army of data scientists, or trying to copy another company’s business plan. It is about becoming a data- driven organization. By doing so, it ensures that key decisions, actions and procedures are managed in an efficient way, being strongly influenced by data-driven insights. It also reduces the risk of human error as it relies on several factors outside human intuition.
The digital revolution forces every organization to reinvent itself, or at least rethink how they do business. Most large organizations have made substantial investments in what is generally labeled as “digital transformation.” While those investments are projected to surpass 6.8 trillion dollars by the year 2023, they are often made without seeing clear benefits.
Transformations are hard, and digital ones are harder. This year’s results suggest that digital transformations are even more difficult.
McKinsey Institute stated: “The pandemic has dramatically increased the speed at which digital is fundamentally changing organizations”.
In the research they conducted, only 16 percent of respondents say their organizations’ digital transformations have successfully improved performance and also equipped them to sustain changes in the long term. An additional 7 percent say that their performance improved but that those improvements were not sustained.
Digital transformations require cultural and behavioral changes such as calculated risk taking, increased collaboration, and customer centricity. (photo credit: fabio/Unsplash)
