Digital culture meaning

The 21st century is expected to become an era of digital transformation and development of global digital culture. Digital transformation is impossible without digital culture. 

Previously we wrote that the digital transformation process is going. Even though by the end of 2019 even the advanced countries haven’t realized more than 12-18% of their digital potential, all the states understand the digitization is very important, it simplifies administration processes, helps to take decisions, capable of fighting corruption. 

The thing is that successful digital transformation may be performed providing there is a definite level of a so called digital culture. Nowadays this term is applied mainly to the business where digitization processes are already launched. 

However, today we are going to talk about digital culture in the whole society as a part of digitization and not only about digital culture in companies. We will start with explanation of digital culture in corporations and after that will describe why societal digital culture is also important.

Corporate digital culture

The situation is that digital transformation depends on several factors. Its effect does not depend mostly on the most advanced sensors, algorithms or analytics tools. It depends also on a wider range of factors, most of which are related to personnel and organizational activities, organizational and information (digital) culture. 

What is digital culture? – This is data that ordered and presented in the best possible way for analysis and perception by a person, i.e., data turned into a useful resource. 

Nowadays data becomes in fact the same asset as finance, equipment or real estate. However, the data should be properly organized, this is the only way to transform the data into the asset. Big data itself is not a resource or asset, it is required to spend a lot of efforts to process it and transform into a valuable asset that will be monetized in the future. 

Today business face a great challenge, there is a constantly growing demand in data and companies extremely need to collect, accumulate, process, analyze, protect the data, transforming it into the asset. This is the essence of the information culture: to be able to turn data into useful resource and asset. 

What’s more, digital culture is about improvement of business-processes in an organisation which aim is to ensure that all the decisions are taken on the basis of data, and not on the basis of experience or intuition. So data becomes a powerful tool for decision-making. And the better our data organized – the better decisions we are able to take. This a so called data-driven approach to decision-making process.

So, digital culture is also a set of skills in handling data and information using modern technologies, both to satisfy own needs or to present data to a consumer. digital culture

Digital culture in a society 

What is the role of societal digital culture in the process of digital transformation? Does it even exist? Or the government is the only entity that is interested in digital transformation? Let’s discuss. 

The term digital culture can be also interpreted as a set of a knowledge, skills, a certain style of thinking and behavior, which together provide adaptation to technical innovations. This means that society or individuals with low digital culture is less adoptable to new information services.

Nowadays practically all states understand benefits of digitization and develop state-level information systems for its needs. Obviously, taking into account the scope of the task, the government takes fully the role of the developer and promoter of the system. By the way, except China, where digitization is carried out via public-private partnership. So, performing digitization activities, the government should:

  1. Actively develop state information system(s);
  2. Explain benefits of the results of the process;
  3. Perform promotional activities;
  4. Show a “personal” example – apply the results of digital transformation in governmental authorities as much as possible;
  5. Apply GaaS approach. To think that created system is a service and not just a system that is recommended or obligatory to use; 
  6. Transfer to described above data-driven decision-making approach. 

Actually point 5 is both a task and the final result of all the activities. And getting back to the 1st part of the article, data-driven decision-making approach is an integral part of the digital culture. So this is a great challenge also because nowadays decision-making process in governments cannot be considered as fully data-driven. Obviously, complete data-driven approach is impossible without implementation of state-scale information system which involves all the citizens, government, all the authorities. 

By the way, one of our previous articles was dedicated to elaboration of an idea to outsource development of GaaS solutions.

And what about the society? So, the society of any state should:

  1. Actively use the created system;
  2. Give feedback;
  3. Understand that when all is said and done, they are direct beneficiaries of all the efforts.

These aspects of government’s and society’s activities are simply everything about societal digital culture.  

Summary

Digital transformation is an ongoing process in many countries. In organisations, it is mainly about applying data-driven approach to a decision-making process instead of decision-making based on experience. 

Properly organized data is consi dered to be asset. Digital culture is about working with data and transferring data to the asset.  

Talking about societal digital culture, it is necessary to understand that any government, being a developer and promoter of a created state information system should also aim at applying data driven approach to decision-making process, promote digitization activities, explain its benefits to a society. A society in its turn, should understand that they are direct beneficiaries and help the government build the system, at least simply use what was created.