An interesting debate going around our community nowadays. "What is the difference between digitization and digitalization?".
I come across several people who use these two terms interchangeably. I get confused here. Usually, i quote some information available in the internet related to this topic and I found that there exist a clear line that separates between these two. Theoretically though. But that was not convincing enough to convince them that they both are different. So, I lose out on the argument. However, nowadays, I changed my stance while putting my argument and I say now that they both are related to each other. Now I make more friends. Fun. No?
It took me some time to realize that they are indeed related to each other while I still say there is a line between the two. Confusing?. I used to put it like this.
Digitization is a process of converting any thing into digits (ones and zeros), make it digital. The thing here could be analog data, logs, description about somethings, lets say, equipment, its location, attributes etc. So, any thing, description of any thing, Information available in papers, hard copies etc. Converting them into digital format is called digitization. Simple. Converting hard copies into soft copies. At the end of this process, we build a huge collection of digital resources. This resources could be built by converting existing analog resources in the enterprise into digital format and as much as possible encouraging thereafter creation of new data by the enterprise processes in the digital format itself. 
Now, what is Digitalization then? Confusion comes most of the time because they both sounds similar. Digitization and Digitalization. One small spelling mistake, you are into other word. Don't kill me here. One can definitely find definition in internet. So, we have built huge collection of digital resources. How are we going to manage this huge amount of data and more importantly what we are going to do with this? The answer is "adopt Digitalization". Let me go in little more detail.
With recent advancements in IT technologies, there are tools and techniques now available to manage and process huge amount of data, the digital data, the digital resources that we built through Digitization process. With the right techniques and vision in place, it is possible to extract useful information from those digital resources. This has opened up new opportunities to expand the existing applications / processes to make use of the huge amount of digital resources and thereby improve their efficiency.  For instance, there are applications that can be migrated from traditional infrastructure to Big data based infrastructure that can support parallel processing of the data by distributing the data across multiple machines. Unlike traditional system, Big data based system mostly moves the business logic to the place where data is stored. Hadoop does this very nicely. There are proofs that businesses were able to use such technologies to mine the digital information they have, could change the way existing processes work, and finally could improve the business. In a sense, they evolved their business model by using recent advancements in IT. It became a general strategy now for any industry. This is what we can call Digitalization. More formally, Digitalization is the strategy of adopting recent technologies in IT to make the most of the digital resources available in the enterprise. Some of the benefits to adopt this strategy are:
  1. Evolve business models to improve businesses, customer experience, more productivity etc.
  2. Automation and Factory of the future
  3. Ease of doing business
  4. Growth; Stay in the race and edge ahead of others.

So, nowadays, I am not sure whether I made friends but at least I am not making new enemies (too much!!!!) in the debate as I started saying the following phrases. (In a sense became Moderator :-) that neither here not there guy)
BY PROTAS LEVINA BAPRM 42657