Digital has now become the lingua franca of our times, whether it is for driving cars or rigging elections. In a large number of cases, however, the mere use of computer technology is perceived to be digital. But that is only half the story and gives little indication of the technology’s full potential.
Consider, for instance, the simple matter of the text messages sent by various service providers, reminding users of payments due. Most of these reminders end with : ‘Ignore this message if you have already paid’. Users must surely wonder how difficult it is in this age of technology for such service providers to separate subscribers who have paid their bills and those who have not. But no, the service providers will not change. And, when asked, they say they are using digital technologies — after all, they have saved on paper using mobile telephony, and other such platitudes.
Or consider the use of Facebook during the 2016 elections in the US. Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump used the platform for their campaigns. In fact, Clinton outspent her opponent by a wide margin and yet, her opponent won.
Nefarious or not, Trump won by using technology to deliver messages tailored to an almost individual level, rather than use Facebook as an advertising medium.
Both these are examples of a superficial application of computing technologies — in the first case, the mere use of text messaging and in Clinton’s case the use of social media, is deemed ‘digital’, when, in fact, it is merely a baby step in the path to truly going digital.
Digitising vs digitalising
The dictionary defines digitise and digitalise the same way — as ‘converting analogue data into a digital form that can be processed by a computer’. We would like to state this differently.
To digitise is to convert analogue data into a digital form; to digitalise is to use digitised data to support decisions, enable transactions and exchange information at a large scale and concurrently across enabled devices.
What does this mean?
Consider the issuance of railway tickets by the Indian Railways. People of a certain era will recall a time when planning a rail journey had a lead time of at least four months. It involved filling up a form and standing in a queue, often for an entire day, to get a ticket. And if the travelling party was more than four people, the process had to be repeated for each block of four people.
To its credit, the Railways went through phases to reach its current digital state. It first computerised processes to speed up ticket issuance, which involved using computers to provide information on availability of tickets at a faster pace. Then, it digitised to reduce the time required to book tickets. In this phase, the Railways made information readily available to the booking agents, who could then take decisions at the counter. The third phase involved a hybrid process of digitalisation within a digitised framework.
Consumer convenience
During this phase, a number of seats were blocked for reservation via the internet. Thus, these blocked tickets could be processed concurrently, rather than one at a time. And today, we have the current process, where the entire ticketing process is digital where multiple concurrent reservations can happen till the moment of the train departure.
While each stage of the process yields benefits, they are only incremental and impact only one or two elements of the process. But once a full-blown digitalisation happens, it has a quantum impact. Consider the digitalisation of the Railways and the benefits it has seen — consumer convenience is probably at the highest; there have been fewer ticketing errors, less use of paper and specialised stationery; deployment of its erstwhile agents in more fulfilling positions; load optimisation of trains, leading to better usage of infrastructure; preventing black-marketing of tickets, and more.
The framework
Digital is an integration of diverse systems. At its simplest, digitising is the starting point of the digital framework. Without this essential step, one cannot hope to become ‘digital’.
A digital framework comprises five essential components:
~ Data capture or processes by which users of the framework can create data, either by providing it directly or it being automatically created as a result of a user action.
~ Autonomous decision support or a method by which the data provided can be processed and decisions made autonomously, without humans.
~ Concurrent processing of multiple systems or a technology infrastructure that allows extraordinarily large volumes of data to be captured and processed simultaneously.
~ Automated fulfilment systems that complete transactions between users of the framework based on their inputs.
~ Ability to transfer data and interactions across different, but appropriately enabled device types.
Behind the scenes
Let us look at how these steps happened in the Railways scenario. When users enter their journey data, two levels of data are created: one, data the user has entered; and two, the data the Railways will use, say, to change the availability of seats on the train.
Following the data provided by the website users, the second step of the process kicks in, informing them whether or not the request can be fulfilled; the cost and the payment process.
This, however, is the only part of the decision support visible to the passenger. Invisible to the passenger would be processes that create the reservation charts and update the availability of seats, among others.
And the Railways booking system does all of this, handling tens of thousands of such requests simultaneously. The public-facing transactions are managed through its web-based portals, while internal systems are probably run through its private networks.
After all these, the process is completed by the fulfilment cycle, when a text message and an email are sent to the passenger, providing the PNR to enable travel with an option to print the ticket too. While in this case, the fulfilment can happen electronically, in other cases, such as an e-commerce transaction, the process would require human intervention. In those cases, the processes involving the exchange of information is still digital.
Today, all these happen via computers, smartphones and feature phones. It will hardly be surprising if, in the future, the Railways has electronic reservation charts or seats with electronic panels where the passenger name is displayed!