Digitally ready or not, it is time for companies to evolve to remain relevant to their customers as digitisation moves out of a technology realm and into a business imperative.

A three-city panel debate spearheaded by Telkom Business saw participants unpack the inevitability of “digital” – driven by the rise of mobility, cloud computing and big data – becoming the epicentre of a business strategy.

“The world is changing and no business will be immune to the impact of digitisation,” Telkom Group COO Dr Brian Armstrong said earlier this month, pointing out that matching customer needs with digital strategies was fast becoming one of the biggest challenges facing companies.

Discussions around whether companies should develop a “digital strategy” or a “corporate strategy” in a digital age continue, particularly as the definition of digitisation remains narrow, with the focus still on technology.

“Digitisation means different things to different groups of executives and people. Digitisation is not primarily about technology, it is firstly a social and business phenomenon, which is underpinned by technology,” he said.

“Today’s major technology trends – cloud computing, unified communications, big data, mobility, machine-to-machine, the Internet of Things and social and digital media – are becoming pervasive,” added Ovum enterprise senior analyst Richard Hurst.

There is a need for business to “weave” the current trends into business practices and strategies to gain a competitive business advantage, which, in turn, will provide operational efficiency – doing something better – and “difference” positioning – doing things differently or doing different things – leading to the first-mover advantage of predicting, influencing and responding to industry needs.

Frost & Sullivan growth implementation solutions director Alistair Petersen said: “Digital is not something that is coming. It is already here – if you do not embrace it you will be controlled by it [or become irrelevant].”

A Telkom White Paper has found that 32.5% of companies in Africa did not have a digital strategy – higher than the global average of 22%.

Further, the report, titled ‘The impact of digiti- sation on businesses in South Africa’ highlighted the birth, by 2020, of a new generation – Generation Connected – which, like the current “digital natives”, would experience computers, the Internet, mobile phones, texting and social networking as a lifestyle, with the reliance on technology placing pressure on companies to implement ever-expanding digital models.

The paper has pointed out that from 1990 to 2010, the number of personal computers worldwide grew from around 100-million to 1.4-billion.

Two decades ago, there were ten-million mobile phone users and three-million Internet users, which, over the 20-year period, increased to five-billion and two-billion respectively.

By mid-2012, there were 167.3-million Internet users in Africa and 8.5-million in South Africa.

Further, there are several forecasts of 50-billion connected and 200-billion intelligent devices by the end of this year, with expectations that, by 2020, around 275 exabytes a day of data will be sent across the Internet and data volumes will experience a 50-fold increase.

“Companies will have to redesign their organisations, partnerships and operations,” said Accenture digital and technology strategy MD Lee Naik.