Digital transformations fail because they miss the difference that just two letters can make

“Digitalization” minus “Digitization” equals “tali”

My best performing piece on Medium is “How I learned what “digital transformation” truly means after waving 👋 to a couple Gs”. In that post, I discuss how the words “digitization” and “digitalization” have completely different meanings. I couldn’t figure out why this was the case. It turns out it’s the dictionary’s fault.

If you look in a conventional dictionary, the definition of “digitalization” reads:

“Digitalization: The act or process of converting from analog to digital.”
— Wordnik

And for “digitization” it reads:

“Digitization: The conversion of data or information from analog to digital or binary.”
— Wordnik

So if you grow up in the normal world where dictionaries matter, you’re not going to immediately make a distinction between the two words. However, if you’re in the management consultancy space, there’s a certain utility in refining the meaning of these two words to have different meanings. And that’s what’s happened over these last five years, but I was still…