Digitalization – An Endless Journey

Digitalization is a never-ending process that has lots of positive effects on our daily lives and offers new opportunities for supporting people in their work.

The digital transformation is an endless journey: You can approach it one stage at a time, but the end point is impossible to predict or pin down precisely. “The digital revolution is not a radical upheaval, but a process that has been going on for several years,” says Austrian futurologist Reinhold Popp. As briefly discussed in our article “Rapid Development”, the early inventions of the industrial revolutions heralded some drastic and specific changes. Digitalization has become a constant presence in our lives at work and at home, bringing with it substantial shifts and plenty of new opportunities.

Evolutionary side effects

The purpose of human invention is to make things quicker and easier. However, measures to improve the efficiency of industrial processes trigger various side effects too, such as changes in the way we organise our leisure time: From embracing the convenience of online shopping, streaming, and video communication through to using sensors to enhance sport or shore up health checks. By now we are very much used to seeing the positive side of digitalization and seizing the opportunities it offers. Yet tools that were originally designed for personal use have long since found their way into everyday working life as well.

One particularly well-known example of this evolutionary reciprocal effect is the tremendous success of tablets or smartphones in the world of work. Employees can use tools like the teamAPP, for example, to communicate their preferred working hours or offer to swap shifts with their teammates. Meanwhile, IoT displays and digital labels are recreated in the form of wireless display systems used in logistics, production, and commerce, where they play a key role in smart solutions for visualising information digitally in real time to improve workflows and keep costs and errors to a minimum. Another area where smart devices have become the norm is remote service systems. Just like any development based on human invention, all these applications are aimed at doing the same thing: making things easier for people.

Optimising support through networking and communication

Communication in real time is forging more and more links between everyone and everything involved in working processes, be they human or machine. But that does not mean that humans are being pushed aside. In fact, they are taking centre stage thanks to “technological humanism”, a concept that focuses on the positive effects of digitalization for humankind. Getting machines to carry out repetitive and physically demanding tasks improves safety in the workplace, while having the ability to analyse huge quantities of data quickly leads to accurate results. In this respect, the digital transformation is making at least gradual progress along the endless evolutionary path towards its ultimate goal: combining advanced technologies with human skills to relieve the strain on people and create more time for them to enjoy creative activities that bring them added value.