Digitalization from my point of view

I was born in 1980’s and in my time, digitalization has taken a huge leap. It’s funny to see old movies from the 80’s and 90’s where future is predicted. In Back to the future II film showed future in the year 2015 with flying cars and boards. Well, it seems that movie makers were too optimistic, and we are not there yet. Although lots of things have changed and it’s always interesting to imagine what kind of future we will have.

I my childhood we only had landline phone. I remembered all needed phone numbers or looked those from phone book. I had my first mobile phone when I was 16-year-old. With that phone I could only call and send text messages. My own children had their own mobile phones when they started school. Modern children won’t call or even answer to mom’s phone calls. They send messages via WhatsApp or Snapchat, mostly photos or emoji’s, not much written text. For them phones are for fun and entertainment. So far, the phone development is done mostly based on user’s needs. It will be interesting to see what kind of ”phones” we will have in the future.

Schools have also taken a digital leap. In elementary schools smart devices are used to support learning. Children look for information, play educational games, take photos etc. Smart devices were a huge help in spring 2020 when all Finland was assigned to remote school. My first touch in computers was in elementary school when I learned to use mouse with Paint- drawing program. In my later studies first time I really needed a computer was in university of applied sciences. Courses were found from virtual environment and school assignments had to be returned there. In my current master’s studies virtual learning environment has developed a lot since my last studies. Studying is made easy, interactive and flexible.

I work at marketing department in an industrial company. I have worked in my current role for seven years. During that time, I have learned how important digitalization is for businesses. Customer’s needs change and companies must change with them. With help of digitalization business can be renewed. Customers can be found all over the world and new services can be built to support the old one. Data has extremely important role and thanks to digitalization it’s easier every day to gather it. In the past marketing decisions were done based on feeling or experience. Nowadays marketing actions can be measured and almost all decisions can be done based on data. This means more efficient actions and opportunity for quick changes and testing.

My future challenges in digitalization will be marketing automation and digital customer journey. With marketing automation it would be possible to automate marketing actions such as sending e-mails and free time from manual work. Digital customer journey is a big project containing company’s all digital systems for the customer. Idea is to make buying easy as possible. Project was started a year ago and it is still at the beginning. It will be interesting to see what kind of solutions we can create for our customers.

GDPR

GDPR (general data protection regulation) came in to force in May 2018. This means that people have more control over their personal data and businesses have a level playing field. Rapid technological developments in the last two decades have brought new challenges for the protection of personal data. The scale of data sharing and collection has grown exponentially, sometimes taking place on a global level, and individuals are increasingly making personal information publicly available.
Read more: https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/policies/data-protection-reform/

In marketing we must be very accurate in GDPR related issues. We must have customer’s consent when collecting personal data, we must know what information we can collect and we must give customer an easy access to correct or delete their data. I think it is very important that we respect people’s privacy. GDPR has also forced us to be creative and to produce better content. This is not a bad thing either.

Self-evaluation

This is my first blog and I enjoyed writing it. I use English daily at work but I never write this kind of texts, usually just short emails. It’s great to practice fluent English writing.

Related videos were very interesting to watch. After seeing James Lyne’s presentation about cybercrime, I started thinking my own behavior online. I should be more careful in the future, especially with passwords. Some of the videos were relatively old and it would be nice to hear how Pranav Mistry’s SixthSense technology has developed from year 2009. It seems that with future technology everything is possible. To make it happen we might need to combine human brain and AI.

I left my comments on Laura’s and Tatja’s blog.