As your organization grows and expands, its external and internal business processes become more complex, especially if you have opened several stores or outsourced some working tasks. Digitalization can help you streamline workflows and gain a clear understanding of how your business is performing. Now companies need solutions that can be customized without coding, withstand the pace of business growth, and meet new requirements. Such systems should have high performance in all modes and an intuitive interface. What does the market expect from digitalization in 2022? Let’s find out.
Key players and their expectations
Like any other technology, digitalization has its leaders (innovators) and early adopters. There is the so-called early majority — more cautious, but with the financial capacity to close the gaps and push the technology towards mass deployment. Finally, digitalization has followers, those who adapt to the new reality and create useful startups like Sign.ECO.
Before talking about approaches to digitalization in different countries, it is important to understand that, based on the characteristics and expectations of its key participants, it will be used in different ways. Let’s consider the main, in our opinion, players:
- Private companies see digitalization as a way to enter new markets with one strategic goal — to survive in the future. In addition, digitalization allows companies to increase growth by at least 5%;
- State-owned companies, as participants in the ecosystem, act as a kind of governmental tool. They have a large technology deployment budget and investment to accelerate the adoption of proven technology into the mass market. Within the framework of digitalization, they mainly implement state programs;
- Startups are active participants in the process. They create new ideas and technologies. Some people do it well, and later on, they can become tech giants;
- Authorities (at the municipal, regional, or federal level). Their goal is to attract as many promising people and companies to the city, region, and country as possible to improve their rating and become more thriving and attractive.
Now, when the difference between the key players is more or less clear, you can look at how digitalization is progressing in different countries, which of the actors is controlling this process. Let’s take France and the United States for example.
Key approaches to digitalization
In France, the country is run mainly by private companies in cooperation with relatively small cities, with their limited power and budget. Thus, most tech initiatives are local in nature, and scalability takes longer than it could be. However, freedom of action also provides more opportunities for creating new things. As a successful example, the French Tech initiative, which was developed in 2013, has shown its potential. In 2020, according to surveys by the consulting company Ernst & Young, French Tech became the first techno-ecosystem in the European Union, which was able to attract almost 5.4 billion euros and create four new “unicorns”. And 2020 has confirmed the resilience, maturity, and attractiveness of French startups to investors.
In the US, this approach is even more different, as digitalization is governed by GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon). This free innovation model brings big changes for consumers but does not concern citizens at all. As a result, there are practically no “smart” cities in the United States.
According to IoT-Analytics, we will see an active development of digitalization in the post-Covid world. Four areas will dominate this process: company-wide digitization, access to remote assets, business process automation, and cybersecurity. If by 2020 the leaders in digitalization were the countries of Europe and the USA, then in the coming years the alignment of digital forces will change in favour of East Asia and the Pacific region.
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