The COVID-19 pandemic is changing much of what business and society takes for granted. It may also be the incentive needed to get digital transformation done.

Digital transformation, or digital business, has been high on the must-haves list of strategic initiatives from consulting firms and information technology vendors for more than half a decade. Evolving from earlier suggestions that businesses must become “data-driven,” the entire set of strategic thinking can be traced back to the emergence of “big data” as far back as the mid-2000s.
An Economist special report “Data, data everywhere” in February 2010 began with a quote: “Information has gone from scarce to superabundant. That brings huge new benefits…but also big headaches.” Rereading the report a decade later, it is surprising how little has changed, beyond an increase of a couple of orders of magnitude in data volumes and the emergence of a new and even larger source of data—the Internet of Things.

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