They’re calling the technology explosion that has occurred in the last few years a ‘disruption’ to businesses. But is it really a disruption, or is it simply change?
Digital disruption refers to the rapidly changing climate for businesses brought about by social media and information technology resources. It is change “enabled by digital technologies that occur at a pace and magnitude that disrupt established ways of value creation, social interactions, doing business and more generally, our thinking.
The ‘disruption’ occurs on every level of life, from the way we communicate and transfer information between people and organisations, to the way business conduct their activities such as cloud based computing and telecommuting. These changes are facilitated by constantly evolving technology that can be a blessing and a curse for businesses depending on how they respond to the disruptions.
The term ‘disruption’ generally connotes some type of negative disturbance. It may not be an accurate term to describe the change brought about by technology. Simply, technology is progression that forces businesses to behave, interact and carry out their activities differently. Indeed, those businesses who fail in doing this may well call this evolution a disruption simply because they are likely to be left behind.
More and more, business are spending money on social media and digital online strategies which put the “customer at the centre of the experience” before they try to balance competing interests and elements in terms of people, platforms and planning. Today, 36% of small businesses and 77% of large firms now have some form of social media presence. Of those, one quarter of small businesses claim to have a “strategy” for digital and social marketing, spending, on average, $4600 a year to maintain it. These are the businesses who are responding to the ‘disruption’ that is occurring. Simply ignoring the effect of social and digital media will not make it go away. In fact, business may find themselves being left behind by the businesses who are choosing to embrace the ‘disruption’ and make it work in their favour.
It is best to think about the digital disruption as an opportunity. It is best to think about it as an evolution of not only business practice and communication, but of personal practice that changes the way we think, communicate and behave generally.
At Grange, we are seeing more and businesses embrace the “digital disruption”. Many cloud accounting options are providing greater flexibility and improved efficiency in their record keeping processes by allowing them to record expenses and issue invoices to customers on the go. If you would like to chat to us about how we can assist your business in dealing with the digital ‘evolution’ please call us today
