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Keeping you up-to-speed with digitalization trends. Addressing challenges of efficient and compliant digital business. Stay tuned!
A large majority of businesses and other organizations are busy digitizing their operations. Until recently digitalization has been viewed as a matter that primarily concerned in-house IT teams and was not of much interest to the management, but now the situation has changed. Today many directors are actively involved in the digitalization – according to a survey we conducted among large and medium-sized companies in 2017, this share is about 50%, a considerable increase from a similar study carried out ten years ago.
The developments we have witnessed over the last two years have shaken our society, and the entire world, to the core. There have been changes, and changes are something that people are eager to avoid. We like to dwell in the familiar, feeling safe in our bubble although we know that great potential awaits outside our comfort zone. Well, in these times, the fear of change not a good thing to hold on to.
The success of the digitalization on the inside, where the organization strives to tame the data chaos and improve the efficiency of its operations, and on the outside, where it focuses on enhancing its customer experience and adapting to the challenges of the digital transformation, depends on how effectively the organization has implemented the key building blocks of digital business.
The pandemic has fundamentally and permanently changed workplace conditions and working from home has gone from an occasional practice to everyday reality. Organizations around the globe were forced to move their employees to their home offices practically overnight. Digitalization quickly became a household term and some companies thought they would have it covered once they had purchased enough laptops and Zoom user licenses. Soon they realized that it was just the first step in a long journey and that the pandemic has created many more complex challenges.
The definition of anachronism is a person or thing that is placed in a time period or circumstances where it does not fit. Transfer of actions or rules from paper-based to digital operations, without considering the potential of digital, is an anachronism.
My career has been centred around health IT for 30 years. When I was starting out, ‘punched cards’ were still in use; in business processes, I had to cope with a wide spectrum of data transfer media and I learnt and grew, together with the users, from black/white DOS solutions to state-of-the-art applications, cross-system data exchange, cloud storage, and mobile apps.
Comprehensive understanding of the role of system metadata in business processes is particularly relevant if we are to ensure optimal provision of sufficient audit traceability of different document types and optimize the business processes within the organization.
Our advice to organizations that are undertaking digitization projects is to narrow down their software support requirements to a few key characteristics, with the choice of the digital platform carrying even more weight that designated applications.
The key that unlocks the full usability of metadata is appropriately managed metadata structure, which reflects the specific needs of the company and its clients.