Digital. Digitized. Digitization. Digitalization. Don’t Get Fooled by the New Buzzwords for Outdated Tech!

Leave it the moronic marketers to come up with the most brain-dead buzzwords to launch us into the new decade. Over the past year, these have been on the rise despite the fact that you should NOT even be looking at any vendor building an entire marketing campaign around this gibberish in 2020. (The only exception is if they open up about how useless the word is and instead lay out a roadmap which defines the many possible levels and how they intend to get there, but this is a topic for a later post.)

Why do these buzzwords make the doctor sympathize with Kuni from UHF who had to keep screaming they’re so stupid every time he got a new batch of students? Because it seems the doctor has to keep screaming it every time we get a new batch of marketers that couldn’t tell a calculator from a computer.

Let’s look at the definitions of these terms.

Digital: displaying a readout in numerical digits or available in electronic form; readable and manipulable by computer
This means that, technically, a vendor who sells you a process that can be performed on a calculator or any system that works on a computer, including e-mail and a two decades old spreadsheet, can claim to have a digital Procurement Solution. Moreover, technically, the earliest MRP was “digital” in the Procurement world. Do you really want to be stuck with four decades old technology? Because that’s digital!

Digitized: to convert (data) to digital form for use in a computer
This means that if the digital solution includes the ability to handle document scans, which may or may not be processable, then the solution is digitized. E-mail that can handle attachments and a decades old spreadsheet solution still qualifies.

Digitization: the process of converting (data) to digital form
This means that if the solution comes with the ability to integrate with the output of scanning technology, it qualifies. So, email, a decades old spreadsheet solution, and a UX for the scanner driver qualifies.

Digitalization: the process of converting (data) to a digital form that can be processed by the application
This actually brings us up to the nineties, because now you need a system that supports OCR and can convert that scan into a spreadsheet with numeric and textual values for processing in the decades old spreadsheet solution.

Just like the imbeciles who brought back infinite scroll (because it’s theoretically easier to scroll on mobile devices — but that’s only the case if the page fits in memory and, more importantly, can actually load — which isn’t the case when you put a whole website with heavy graphics onto a single page), these moronic marketers should also be tar-and-feathered. Dumbing down technology by decades doesn’t help anyone, and the doctor is fed up of this data dung and is going to rip into any vendor who continues to peddle this tomfoolery.