Digitalization

Welcome to new era of Digitalization.   I am sure it is truly buzz word in our every day now a days. This article explains fundamental concept of Digitalization which brings value to business and its revenue system. 

Below are few key definitions of Digitalization.

“Digitalization is the use of digital technologies to change a business model and provide new revenue and value-producing opportunities; it is the process of moving to a digital business.” 

“Digitalization is the integration of digital technologies into everyday life by the digitization of everything that can be digitized. The literal meaning of digitalization gives an apparent idea of development and technology dependent world. In this chapter, digitalization means computerization of systems and jobs for better ease and accessibility.”

Digital Transformation

Digital Transformation is once in life time technology shift from our current business state.  It transforms every industry & every business in the world into digitization era.  At present many firms are in IT Industrialization phase and looking for new business opportunity and business values.  The concept of “Digitalization” helps to achieve that strategic business objectives.

Below picture explain our current state and expected changes in Digitization world.

There are sequence of steps to move our current legacy business model into digitalization.

1) First step in the digital transformation process is fundamentally change the way you think about your business.

2) Changing to invent in new business model with latest emerging digital technologies from traditional business model.

3) You need to address these changes in new business model before competitors do.

4) Digital Transformation will have big impact in your business in the way of revenue, customer satisfaction, competitive advantage, and improve productivity.

Below few popular firms which have been transformed into “Digitalization” world most recent time with emerging technologies like Bigdata, Cloud, Containers, Machine learning and etc.,

• UBER
• AIRBNB
• TESLA

Below are few Key Technologies and Key Terms which have been used in “Digital Transformation” process of business

Open Source:

It is denoting software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. 

Open source software is software with source code that anyone can inspect, modify, and enhance."Source code" is the part of software that most computer users don't ever see; it's the code computer programmers can manipulate to change how a piece of software—a "program" or "application"—works. Programmers who have access to a computer program's source code can improve that program by adding features to it or fixing parts that don't always work correctly.

Big Data:

extremely large data sets that may be analyzed computationally to reveal patterns, trends, and associations, especially relating to human behavior and interactions.  Big data is a term for data sets that are so large or complex that traditional data processing application software is inadequate to deal with them. Big data challenges include capturing data, data storage, data analysis, search, sharing, transfer, visualization, querying, updating and information privacy.

Big data Infrastructure Stack

Cloud:

Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of compute power, database storage, applications, and other IT resources through a cloud services platform via the internet with pay-as-you-go pricing. Amazon is leading cloud provider at present, it has 1000+ services are offered via their cloud platform.

Containers:

A container is micro programing model.  Container image is a lightweight, stand-alone, executable package of a piece of software that includes everything needed to run it: code, runtime, system tools, system libraries, settings. Available for both Linux and Windows based apps, containerized software will always run the same, regardless of the environment. Containers isolate software from its surroundings, for example differences between development and staging environments and help reduce conflicts between teams running different software on the same infrastructure. 

Containers are a way to package software in a format that can run isolated on a shared operating system. Unlike VMs, containers do not bundle a full operating system - only libraries and settings required to make the software work are needed. This makes for efficient, lightweight, self-contained systems and guarantees that software will always run the same, regardless of where it’s deployed.  Docker automates the repetitive tasks of setting up and configuring development environments so that developers can focus on what matters: building great software.

Docker container is one of the popular container platform.  Docker is the world’s leading software container platform. Developers use Docker to eliminate “works on my machine” problems when collaborating on code with co-workers. Operators use Docker to run and manage apps side-by-side in isolated containers to get better compute density. Enterprises use Docker to build agile software delivery pipelines to ship new features faster, more securely and with confidence for both Linux, Windows Server, and Linux-on-mainframe apps.

DEVOPS (Developer + Operational):

DevOps is the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increases an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity: evolving and improving products at a faster pace than organizations using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes. This speed enables organizations to better serve their customers and compete more effectively in the market.

Under a DevOps model, development and operations teams are no longer “siloed.” Sometimes, these two teams are merged into a single team where the engineers work across the entire application lifecycle, from development and test to deployment to operations, and develop a range of skills not limited to a single function. Quality assurance and security teams may also become more tightly integrated with development and operations and throughout the application lifecycle.

These teams use practices to automate processes that historically have been manual and slow. They use a technology stack and tooling which help them operate and evolve applications quickly and reliably. These tools also help engineers independently accomplish tasks (for example, deploying code or provisioning infrastructure) that normally would have required help from other teams, and this further increases a team’s velocity.

Conclusion

Digitalization or Digital Transformation process can be achieved by organization easily with help of  open source software and cloud platforms.  In this article, very few open source applications and platforms are referenced in digitalization process.  However, there are large number of open source technologies freely available to be utilized for digital transformation initiation of your business.  I will update this article once again with popular open source software and tools when I get enough information about them. Until then see you.