Digitalisation is not just another buzzword. It is an evolving topic of serious discussion in society, academia, and industry. However, digitalisation is often misinterpreted and misapplied to digitisation. Despite the fundamental differences in these two terms, they are often used interchangeably and incorrectly.

Here we'll give a straightforward explanation of both digitisation and digitalisation, highlight the differences, and give examples of each.

The Differences

When you look at the two words digitisation and digitalisation, the difference is just two letters. Don't let this fool you, the differences are huge and can have a huge impact on the scope and potential value of your business. This is especially true as more businesses transform their businesses for their customers and current and future competitiveness.

Digitisation: conversion of data to a digital format

According to the Gartner Glossary, "[Digitisation] is the process of changing from [analogue] to digital form, also known as digital enablement. Said another way, [digisation] takes an [analogue] process and changes it to a digital form without any different-in-kind changes to the process itself."

Digitisation should be easy to understand. Think of scanning paper records to soft copies that can be stored on any digital medium such as a computer or server.

Digitisation is often the first step to any digital transformation. In other words, digitisation comes before digitalisation. Digitisation can allow your business to reap benefits on efficiency, resilience, and cost. For example, using paperless technology can allow a business to reduce its stationery costs, enable global access to data through the internet, and improve security through data encryption and backup.

Digitalisation; transforming your business processes for a digital world

Digitalisation builds upon the benefits of digitisation. Often more can be done. Your data and documents can be used to drive business decisions and, simultaneously, improve revenue and customer experiences.

According to the Gartner Glossary, "[digitalisation] is the use of digital technologies to change a business model and provide new revenue and value-producing opportunities; it is the process of moving to a digital business."

In other words, you should no longer focus on converting your data and documents from an analogue format to a digital format. As a modern business, you should also think about how you can transform your whole business into a digital business. Embrace digital technology to collect data, establish trends, and make better business decisions.

Learn more about Exxaro's pioneering digital transformation and see how they are transforming by delivering a digital twin to South Africa's mine in Belfast. Furthermore, according to an article by Creamer Media's Engineering News, Exxaro was already enjoying the benefits of being a digital and connected mine even before the mine fully completed its transformation and started operations.

Benefits of digitalisation

Going digital, or digitising, is important and often the stepping stone to being digital, or digitalising. Unlocking value and potential for your business mostly remain from going and being digital. Digitalisation can be aided by cloud technologies, automation, AI, analytics, and other digital technologies. The overall effect of the digitalisation of a business is digital transformation.

A general approach to digitalisation

You now have a better understanding of what digitisation and digitalisation is and the differences. But how should your approach digitalisation? There are many starting points but often businesses start with setting up a way to collect and centralise their data and documents through a cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 or SAP ERP. An ERP system can harmonise all data points to produce a "single source of truth" for all your business processes and the real-time state of the business from wherever and whenever you need it. The benefits of an ERP system include greater efficiency, modern business process standardisation, and improved visibility into the business data, which leads to faster decision-making based on better data.

A few key takeaways from an ERP system according to Investopedia:

• ERP software can integrate all of the processes needed to run a company.
• ERP solutions have evolved over the years, and many are now typically web-based applications that users can access remotely.
• Some benefits of ERP include the free flow of communication between business areas, a single source of information, and accurate, real-time data reporting.
• An ERP system can be ineffective if a company doesn't implement it carefully.

A small business' approach to digitalisation

You might be wondering if you need a comprehensive ERP system. After all, you are a small business with small requirements. An ERP system, in our opinion, is great for medium to large enterprises with 50+ employees. If you're smaller than that we'd suggest starting with 2 systems focused on your sales and marketing and content ecosystem.

Customer Relationship Management System

According to Oracle, customer relationship management (CRM) is a software system that manages your relationships with customers. CRMs are mostly used by sales teams but in recent years they have evolved to also include a business' marketing, commerce, and service functions to name a few.

A few key benefits from a CRM system according to Oracle:

• Offer and sell new, add-on products—at the right time in the right way at the right price.
• Help service teams resolve issues faster.
• Help development teams create better products and services.

There are a lot of great CRM's out in the wild but we'd suggest Zoho's CRM free edition for any small business looking to start migrating their business functions and processes to a digital platform without paying a cent. It supports up to 3 users and comes with a lot of features you'd usually pay for.

Content Management System

According to Hubspot, a content management system (CMS), is a software application that allows users to build and manage a website without having to code it from scratch or know how to code at all.

A few key reasons as to why you should use a CMS according to Hubspot:

• No coding knowledge required
• Easy collaboration
• Access control through user roles and permissions
• SEO and security features and extensions
• Easy access through any internet-connected device

Let's take this a bit further and opt for a headless CMS. Unlike a traditional CMS, a headless CMS can enable you to build and manage content not just for a website, but also for any other digital experiences your business would like to avail to its customers.

There are a lot of headless CMS' out there, such as Strapi, Contentful, and Ghost, but our favourite is Sanity.io. Sanity.io is the unified content platform that powers better digital experiences. Even a headless CMS is becoming traditional. Sanity.io follows the content infrastructure model. According to Contentful, which also follows the same model, content infrastructure is a type of headless content management system, but it doesn’t take the traditional approach of organising content around pages. Instead, it starts with a content model — a framework for organising types of content and defining how each type relates to another.

Now that's more like it. A CRM and CMS can give you much of the benefits of an ERP system without the complexity and high cost. Digital transformation for small businesses at its best.