Learn Business Digital Essentials

Welcome, and thank you for joining me in this learn business digital essentials course!

This course has two parts divided into several chapters in which:

• We’ll identify and decode the digital impact on your daily life by focusing on your own experiences, while also looking at its effect on a global scale.

• I’ll give you the keys to mastering and adopting the digital tools and methods transforming today’s workplace.

Are you ready? Great, let’s get started!

Consider the Impact of Digital on Your Daily Life

Let’s start with an example:

You're on a bus, and a notification pops up on your phone from your favorite news app. It’s about an incident unfolding in Montreal, Canada. Naturally, you immediately think of Lauren, a former colleague who moved there.

You send her the article, asking if she’s OK—you may even check her most recent Instagram posts first.

Situations like this happen to all of us frequently and you'll have certainly experienced the three major changes brought about by the digital age: 

1. Change in time: We are living in the era of real-time. Time is moving faster, and our actions and communication are instantaneous.

2. Change in scale: We are in contact with the “multitude.” Using digital tools, we can now interact with anyone and anything, anywhere in the world, all with a simple click. The scope of possibilities becomes almost infinite.

3. Change of space: Our devices and networks, especially phones, keep us connected wherever we go.

These changes—more so than the lines of cryptic code that we may at first imagine—are what we’re referring to when we use expressions like digital transformation or digital revolution.

Understand the New Practices and Expectations Created by Technological Development

The impact of digital in your daily life is very concrete—in just 30 years, it has completely changed how you do things. To get a better perspective on this, let’s go back to the 90s.

As you can see from this comparison, we are still doing the same things in 2022 that we did in 1992. However, the tools we’re using have changed.

We replaced a wide range of physical items with digital platforms and apps—all accessible online and all in one place: the screen of a computer, tablet, or phone.

Discover Key Figures and Estimates

You feel the impact of these changes on your daily life.

And you’re not alone—the advent of digital has completely upended the entire world and how it operates.

Having trouble visualizing this?

Here are a few key figures that might give you an idea of the scale of these changes:

• Over two-thirds of the world’s population have mobile phones (5.31 billion as of the beginning of 2022). 

• People spend an average of six hours and 58 minutes daily on the internet. That average increases to nearly eight hours for 16- to 24-year-olds.

• About 6 out of 10 working-age internet users (58.4%) buy something online weekly.

Identify the Digital Transformation's Impact on Different Industries

To illustrate how digital is transforming the economy and business in the real world, let’s look at the tourism and hotel industry.

If you weren’t alive back then, or if you were too young to be booking your own travel, ask your grandparents!

To find lodging, you had a choice between:

• Standard rooms in major hotels like Holiday Inn or Hilton, or independent hotels with varying comfort levels for shorter trips.

• Vacation rentals or timeshares that required signing contracts, getting insurance, paying security deposits, etc., for longer stays. 

But that was before platforms like Airbnb came along. With a presence in nearly 200 countries, this California-based start-up has been making industry leaders quake for several years now—without owning a single property, because its platform is built for listing and renting private homes and properties.

The massive success of Airbnb has had several effects:

• Economic effects – by creating a market for non-professionals that didn’t exist before.

• Cultural effects – by offering a new experience that changed how we travel.

• Social and legal effects – the explosion of Airbnb properties in popular tourist destinations like Barcelona, Florence, and Paris has caused skyrocketing housing prices for residents and created unfair competition for hotels. Some cities and countries have had to pass laws to regulate this new market.

This phenomenon isn’t isolated to tourism. No industry is safe: manufacturing, transportation, healthcare, banking—even education is undergoing a full digital transformation.

Let’s Recap!

• Over the last 20 years, technology has transformed how we live on a massive, global, multi-industry, and multigenerational scale.

• Digitalization has brought about three significant changes—to our relationships with time, space, and scale. 

• Although new technologies are at the root of this digital transformation, it is the widespread and easy access to them which has transformed our economy, society and culture.

You’ve learned how to identify the major issues related to digital transformation. Now let’s see how this transformation impacts companies,  and whether they are instigating these changes or simply trying to adapt to them.