What does it mean to do business 4.0? What does it mean to digitize? True digital transformation creates value in a new way, using technology as an enabling factor of the human gaze, so that it can identify new technological combinations and new applications.

It is not just a question of making room for technology, as the information channels suggest. Conveying a vision of progressive replacement of human work with machines promotes a defensive and fearful attitude towards technological innovation, and exhausts digitalization within a limited horizon. Relieving man from the tasks that a machine can perform is only the reason why technology was born, not its destiny.

If the complete meaning of digital transformation is not clear or is strongly misunderstood, the risk is to remain immobilized by fear, unable to seize the opportunities that the current change can offer. For this reason, with Teamax we are committed to promoting digital culture in addition to the dissemination of digital solutions.

The digital transformation at the Power Conference

In 2018 we organized the Power Conference in Treviso, an event aimed at strengthening relations with our partners. We have proposed to our guests the opinion of prof. Francesco Venier, professor of the MIB Trieste School of Management, a consortium created on the initiative of companies and the university world to “enhance talents, develop skills, strengthen leadership to help people and businesses grow“.

Professor. Venier was very clear: technological progress is revealing originally unthinkable potential and solutions that were considered impossible are being realized, changing entire markets. Thanks to digital, objects are transformed from mere products to service delivery tools and, given that a single innovation has widespread effects, the modification of a product has consequences on the related industries of entire sectors.

In the automotive industry, for example, disruptive innovation is represented by driverless cars whose marketing will mark the end of the sale of means of transport in favour of the provision of transport services. These, in turn, will impact on insurance mechanisms and processes related to goods logistics. Equally revolutionary is the effect of technologies that impact on intangible processes, such as blockchain: allowing you to “trust” the content of a digital document without the need for the intervention of third parties acting as guarantors, it has the potential to produce effects in a way transversal on banking processes, on ownership certification, up to company accounting.

The new business challenges

The complete restructuring of the business and economic landscape is taking place and is not reversible, underlined prof. Venier. However, what is taking place is not a crisis, but a transformation in which technology, from a substitute for the workforce, becomes a data collection tool.

What remains for man is the responsibility of obtaining information from data to identify new ways of creating value. For this to happen, the purchase of software and hardware must be followed by a growth in the digital culture of the workforce, by a growing understanding of the potential of technology in an innovative perspective. The new services, the new work, will arise from combinations or new applications of existing tools.

Digitizing, therefore, does not only mean introducing technology into production processes, but also facing a new entrepreneurial challenge that consists in increasing human capital, in the ability of management to create networks between people, to transmit a vision, to motivate them, to create trust and a common language.