Born Analog Vs Born Digital: An Explainer
So this is a term I became familiar with during my course at London Business School earlier this year and I think it’s one of the quickest ways to determine where a business is in terms of modernisation.
Original meaning
The terms ‘born analog’ and ‘born digital’ refers to items, artifacts and ‘things’, that ultimately – one way or another – end up digitized.
‘Born analog’ are things that were created manually and later digitized; ‘born digital’ items are those things that are created digitally only – for example, a scanned image of a photograph is ‘born analog’, while a digital photo taken with a camera is ‘born digital’.
Here’s a better explanation from eCampus Ontario: Three types of digital material
How does this relate to businesses?
In the context of business optimisation, ‘born digital’ refers to companies that have been created in this era of digital tools; they’re founded, backed, developed and run by people who have a solid understanding of the very latest tech and whose first port of call for any business process will be tech-based.
Born analog businesses however are those organisations that were founded and developed before contemporary tech became ubiquitous.
This doesn’t mean that born analog businesses use no technology at all, just that they’re generally not completely up to speed with the current tech, such as those built on or with AI, Machine Learning and so on.
So ‘born analog’ could refer to businesses founded at any time in history – and certainly any time since the industrial revolution – that made good use of the prevailing tech of the time, e.g. the steam engine, mechanical looms, typewriters, telephones, fax machines, computers, mobile phones, PDAs, GPS and more.
But these organisations are likely in a place where making the leap to digital presents significant operational challenges.
Until very recently, even modern business operations have been built to mirror traditional systems. Just look at the icons we use to navigate our way around Microsoft Office: if they’re not based on paper filing methods (folders, filing cabinets, files etc.) they’re still based on tangible items like the floppy disk.
A lot of well-established businesses still retain decades of paper records – for very good reasons – and this is reflected in the way their computerised systems work. That’s good; it helps maintain a consistent and coherent way to access and maintain everything.
(It also offers massive advantages when it comes to proprietary data and moving systems over to contemporary tech, but that’s a topic for another post)
The born analog advantage
Born analog SMEs are in a really good position right now to catch up with and, in many cases, overtake their born digital competitors.
While we’ve become somewhat used to (or conditioned to) thinking that anything ‘old’ needs to be chucked out and replaced with something new, actually at this point in time, the most effective results can be gained by blending the two.
We’re going to discover over the next few years that businesses who retain that embedded knowledge and experience will ultimately fare far better than many of those ‘disruptive’ businesses that attempt to reinvent the wheel.
That’s not to say that born digital and/or disruptive businesses aren’t any good but, like anything, they’re good if they’re in the right place doing the right thing.
Born analog SMEs have a unique advantage: they’re experienced and established enough to know their market and their customers in-depth but also small and nimble enough to be able to make significant process or operational changes when and where they need to.
Ready for the future?
Your born analog SME could be perfectly placed to do its own bit of ‘disrupting’ within your sector or industry – let’s talk about how you can take advantage of the skills, experience and knowledge you’ve developed over years in your business by blending it with new tech and contemporary operational models:
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