The Digital Bridge

The Digital Bridge

Widespread personal and commercial use of the Cloud is now commonly being referred to as a Digital Experience.  This term has a variety of interpretations.  Some practitioners focus on the devices used, including mobile, tablet and browser.  Others look at digital from an interactive perspective, both social and corporate collaboration.  While yet another look at digital from a transactional perspective, like on-line shopping and on-line annual benefits enrollment.

They couldn’t be more wrong.

Whereas all these features are part of today’s on-line experience, they describe Internet and Intranet capabilities that have been in place for over a decade.  And the single commonality of all our technological experiences since the dawn of the mainframe is that they require users to access technologies to get information, conduct processes and engage with others.

Digital Experiences are different.  Digital technologies proactively push information to the user versus waiting for users to come get it.   Digital processes provide needed actions to users without them looking for them.

Consider this example:

You have just gone through airport security and are headed to your gate.  When you get there, you see a different flight is boarding. You look at the hotel monitors (off-line experience) and see that your new gate is across the airport in another terminal.  You rush to the new gate and pull up your phone (on-line experience) to confirm the departure time. You rush in hopes of making your flight.

Or.

While going through security, you receive a text saying your gate has changed and you take action accordingly.

The first scenario shows how both on-line and off-line technologies are available for a user to find key information needed to make a decision and take action.  The second example describes how digital technologies are different. Digital Experiences are a push of timely, relevant, personalized insight to the device of your choosing to enable decision making and action.  Digital technologies enable the fifth and final component of the Information Age: Personalization.

The Information Age

The Information Age

If the telephone was the first globally impactful invention, the personal computer was the second.  Developments in mainframe and midrange computers gave rise to the microcomputer in the 1980’s. This personal computer (PC), as it became known, took computer processing out the hands of large corporations, universities and governmental institutions and let people everywhere use this technology.

What came next was a massive production boom of both hardware and software during the 1980’s and 90’s.  The expansion and utilization of these devices introduced the second component of the Intelligence Age: Computation.  In the 1950’s and 1960’s, the computing power of NASA utilized room-sized computers and card entry systems requiring significant effort, deliberation and validation for basic input and output of modest calculations.  PC’s changed all that with more-intuitive input devices, like keyboards and mice, and software to automate just about any process.