Digitalisierung

Public discussions on the future of labour in the era of digitalization are dominated by notions of self-driving cars, factories without workers or fully automatic logistics. This creates fears of mass destruction of jobs and shrinking employment rates in the future. At the same time, it has led to intense debates on an unconditional basic income: While productivity would rise, a substantial drop in the number of jobs would question the income distribution mechanism our working societies are currently built on. This article argues that while replacement of existing jobs - or at least tasks - by technology will happen and has always happened, this is only one side of the coin. The future of labour markets will be more complex. This is discussed in a macroeconomic, firm and international dimension.

Media disruption interferes with consistent and universal digitalization. Data is easily lost, time and resources wasted. Heterogeneous and isolated applications produce partial relief; however they fail to integrate redundant information from separately operated systems into a homogeneously processible data mass. The employment of a centralized data hub proposes a strategy to effectively advance digitalization in process management, connecting scheduling of involved parties, defect tracking and progress processes. It also automatizes reportings on project progress.

Digitalization is a strategic core issue that has to be anchored in the strategy of every company. The challenge in this context is that there is no uniform pattern for the digital transformation of a company. Instead, each company has to develop its own company-specific plan how it will position itself in the context of digitalization. Furthermore, the development of an individual digitalization strategy is required. The following article presents a planning approach for the development of such a digitalization strategy, based on three major steps.

Companies have always been in a constant state of change. This change is today closely linked to the buzzword’s “digitization” and “agility”. Agile methods, especially in complex projects, can pave the way for targeted digitization and, on the other hand, provide a more agile way of working for digital technologies. Through group discussions with managers from small and medium-sized IT companies, this article focuses on the question of whether agility is the precondition or consequence of targeted digitization. This article is aimed at decision-makers from SMEs who want to increase the degree of agility in the company in the context of increasing digitization.