What is digital transformation? Answers from Russia and the UK.
Identifying the idea of digital transformation is essential at the start. What is digital transformation? In academic literature, digital transformation is often referred as adopting disruptive technologies to increase productivity, value creation, and social welfare.
Why I choose this topic? In my bachelor studies, I wrote a paper about digital transformation in banking but later I shifted the focus to digital transformation across different fields. Thus, the idea to study digital transformation with digital research methods was born.
Considering the rapid growth of technology and noticeable shift from offline to online world, it’s impossible to ignore the emerging notion of digital transformation. However, the concept is not new but still many struggle to define digital transformation and its impact on our lives.
What is digital transformation for UK and Russia?
Search listening is a method that incorporates monitoring search results to gather information on the topic that allows seeing trends, patterns or probably even see emerging concepts as well as describe the current situation with an opportunity to get insights. For this part of the research, I decided to use answerthepublic.com tool to gather search suggestion results from Google.
I inserted digital transformation into the UK’s and Russian search and here are the UK search results:
It is coherent that research results are diverse and touch upon different kinds of things, for instance, from how digital transformation impacts the world, or why digital transformation fails.
Nevertheless, a strong link between digital transformation and improving customer experience can be found, according to the figure on the left. People are searching correlation between digital transformation and customer experience. Supporting that, the figure on the left represents the results of comparison between digital transformation and something else, for example, “digital transformation and customer experience”.
It enlightens that digital transformation in the UK is important for worthy customer experience, while searching digital transformation in Russia doesn’t yield many results. But they are completely different from what previously was found. In this case, people see a digital transformation within a particular field such as “digital transformation in banking”, “digital transformation in public services” and “digital transformation in education and AI”. (Figure below) It gives the impression that digital transformation is seen not to be separated from a field. Whilst in the UK search results, digital transformation was more embraced as a self-sufficing notion. The figure below provides an insight into searching for digital transformation and the customer experience in Russia. There is a lack of it in contrast to the UK search. Though there is a familiarity in those searches — people are struggling to identify what digital transformation is and how exactly it impacts businesses.
Not to miss any other possible results in search suggestions, a google autocomplete tool was applied. The table below summarizes the results. Unfortunately, no unexpected results were discovered, though it’s different from the search results according answerthepublic.com, where a correlation between customer experience and the digital transformation was found. But one thing that is similar in these two different tools is that Russians tend to use digital transformation in education. And it’s an outstanding feature. What’s also interesting, people are looking for the definition, or strategy for digital transformation strategies.
What does Twitter think about digital transformation?
To answer this research question, I used a method called social media scraping, which allows gathering data about a particular subject from a social network. I analyzed data from Twitter using a tool called “Hashtagify” by searching “#digitaltransformation”. And it is particularly interesting as this social network is all over the world and is a great tool that has access to global insights. Surprisingly, North America and India top the list of countries by tweet percentage of “digital transformation” — 36.04% and 15% respectively. Whereas Russia was not even included in the results.
What’s also impresses that two influential accounts that used this hashtag most frequently — Microsoft official account and Ronald van Loon, who is a CEO at Principal Analyst Intelligent World and AI-Data-IoT-Influencer. No surprise that Microsoft is the world leader company in digital transformation.
The figure on the left visually indicates that digital transformation is closely correlated with the Internet of Things, Big Data and Artificial Intelligence. Interestingly, among “tech” terminology, Healthcare is also present in correlation with digital transformation. It also appeared in Google’s autocomplete tool — among all typical search suggestions “digital transformation in healthcare” was seen. Apparently, COVID-19 has shifted our perception of where digital transformation should be implemented and forced, not only businesses, but also the public sector as well as healthcare to turn to online activity.
The next figure demonstrates languages in which digital transformation is spoken. No surprise it’s 91% English because previously we found that the US was at the top by digital transformation hashtags.
What is digital transformation visually? How has the visual perception of digital transformation changed?
Can’t be argued that digital transformation is more of an abstract notion without the physical appearance and the possibility to try it. It’s more of a set of things that enables better business performance. Thus, it makes it a curious subject to study visually.
To study images, a semiotic method was chosen. Semiotics is an investigation into how meaning is created and how meaning is communicated. Its origins lie in the academic study of how signs and symbols create meaning.
The research commences with identifying search results for three different periods — 2010,2015,2020. All of the images represented are the first search results. Although, it’s important to say that the images below were retrieved with Russian Google search settings. The idea is to see how in particular DT visually has been changing and looking at 3 periods will allow seeing the changes in details.
In 2010 digital transformation was seen through green, blue, and grey colors. Looks like it wasn’t clear what is the main color would be. All images did not represent real objects, they all were artificial. Interestingly, in 2010 digital transformation was associated with a fiction movie — ‘Transformers’. Moreover, human features are present in those images, for instance, human eyes. In addition to that, on images all features are vague and flowing, there is no abrupt transition. However, the main question what is the sign of digital transformation remains a puzzle.
Moving on to 2015, we see that there are practically no similarities with 2010. Clearly, more graphs and structural components are evident. Looks like that time the world was trying to enunciate digital transformation, that is why graphs and structures are prevailing. Moreover, many colours are identifying digital transformation from black to vibrant colours. At this stage, I would identify those images as performative, according to Peterson (2017), as images and readers are working together to construct meaning.
Finally, how does digital transformation look now? Apparently, 5 years later, thecolour of digital transformation was finally established— blue. As ten years back, some human features are still present and interconnected with the idea of an artificial network. And it’s the key theme in those images — network. Meaning that digital transformation exists within a network of different elements. Finally, we can suggest that the sign is a network. Signifiers would be a blue, system, net. As for the mental concept or signified, artificial would be the most appropriate term.
To sum up, in 2010–2015 digital transformation has only begun to enunciate visually and by 2021 it has a clearer meaning. Although, I believe that it will be changing in the following years.
To support the meaning I had unpacked, I ran a survey among a few friends of mine to see if it’s the same meaning that others see. The results weren’t so different, although some insights were gained. The first is that on the picture above of digital transformation in 2010 there is actually an absence of content that can be seen in the bottom row. It can be unraveled as an inability to identify digital transformation. Additionally, pictures regarding digital transformation in 2010 are relevant to the idea of futuristic concepts.
Out of curiosity, I changed my Google search settings for the UK. However, my location is in Russia, so I suggest that there might be some inaccuracy due to other internal laptop’s settings. Anyway, here are the results:
They are different from the previous ones. Although, there is one similarity and it’s that most images are graphs and structural. The colours prevailing are orange and a little blue. Nevertheless, we see that there are some familiarities with the 2021 perception of digital transformation. For instance, an idea of a network is present. Again, images contain human features with artificial implications.
Then, 2015 is obviously a graph year. It also has changed colours — earlier green was absent. There are no artificial or human attributes, only statistics. Perhaps, it was a period when a measurement for digital transformation was searched. An opportunity to seize digital transformation.
Apparently, 2021 is a year when digital transformation is more clearly defined. As there is practically no difference in search results for UK and Russia at this time.
To conclude, through the research we’ve seen a visual path that digital transformation has taken, defined what is digital transformation for UK and Russia. We actually followed the transformation through years. Additionally, we also looked at what digital transformation is in the present in terms of the social network such as Twitter. If I were to do this research one more time, I would probably also look at Google Trends to see the context more broadly. Nevertheless, the main goal is achieved and three different digital research methods were used to unpack three research questions that provided us if not with insights but entertaining facts about digital transformation.
