When I work within teams, talk with people and read policy and strategy documents, particularly around the UK public sector, I find it useful to quickly align on what people mean by some words so that we can get stuff done. “Digital” is one of those words.
Many words have multiple meanings. Words can gain and lose those meanings over time as us humans do one of our human things and try to communicate concepts to each other.
Originally a Latin word for fingers and toes, “digital” became part of the phrase “digital computer” when electronic computers were invented in the 20th century.
But digital has acquired several more meanings in the last few decades.
When I ask people what they mean by it there’s different definitions that I regularly hear in the world of digital government policy and public services:
- Digital as a type of technology
- Digital as an online service
- Digital as a way of working
Sometimes these meanings get combined, which can be confusing. I find that disentangling them is useful.
Obviously ‘digital’ is not the only word which gets tangled up in this way, but given its importance it’s a useful one to align on.
1. Digital as a type of technology
Digital can be used to describe any technology related to electronic computers.
This was part of what was happening with the term ‘digital computer’. The original ‘computers’ were humans who added up numbers, it was the addition of technology that made the original computers ‘digital’.
You see this definition used in terms like the ‘digital revolution’ – to indicate the changes happening as the world adapts to computers, internet and the web – or ‘digital infrastructure’ to talk about telecoms infrastructure and data centres.
Implicitly this definition can exclude other forms of technology like physical machinery, roads, wheels, and paper.
2. Digital as an online service
The second usage is digital to mean online services that are only available over the internet or web. It might even be something that only works on a smartphone, like an app. I’m not sure how or why we’ve ended up calling these ‘digital services’ rather than ‘online services’.
Facebook is often called a “digital service” or Google a “digital company”. The UK has a Digital Regulation Cooperation Forum (DRCF) whose purpose is to “deliver a coherent approach to digital regulation for the benefit of people and businesses online” for regulating these kinds of services and companies.
While Facebook/Meta and Google obviously exist in the physical world – just think about one of their many offices, data centres, undersea cables or the tens of thousands of people who work to moderate content – when people talk about their ‘digital services’ they tend to think about the bits that are only visible online.
Similarly the term ‘digital service’ can be used in digital government circles to mean the bits of a public service that are interacted with over the internet and web.
An online service like this is rarely the entirety of a public service – there are many reasons why governments can’t just build websites and apps – but they have become an increasingly important and visible part of public services.
I say rarely, because sometimes governments can reasonably decide that a service will only be accessed online, but there are limits. For example it might be appropriate to require large businesses to pay taxes online but it would be inappropriate to require individuals to pay taxes online unless there was a larger service that provided support to enable everyone to do it.
3. Digital as a way of working
Third, there’s digital as a way of working.
Tom Loosemore of Public Digital talks about digital as ‘applying the culture, processes, business models and technologies of the internet-era’ which is a pretty good description.
It emphasises things that are not only technology and indicates that ‘digital as a way of working’ can be used to improve not only ‘digital as online services’ but also a wider set of services and institutions.
Some people take this kind of definition further to talk about who or what ‘digital’ is for. For example Public Digital’s description talks about using digital ways of working “to respond to people’s raised expectations”. I don’t think everyone has raised expectations.
I tend to encourage teams to decide their purpose in their context.
If the context is delivering general public services then the purpose might be “to meet everyone’s needs”, if the context is tackling issues caused by lack of trust then the purpose might be “to deliver trustworthy services”, etcetera, etcetera, etc.
The definitions can get combined
Finally, it’s important to be aware that many people combine the definitions.
Perhaps they’re using digital ways of working and digital technologies to deliver a digital service. Or perhaps it’s a policy or strategy paper where someone has liberally sprinkled the word digital into all sorts of places in the hope it will make the organisation look modern. Perhaps they’ve invented a wholly new definition, *gulp*.
Sometimes I even find people that don’t even realise that they’re limiting the potential usefulness of their modern ways of working by only applying it to computer technologies and only to bits of services that are visible online on the web and internet. That they’ve ended up accidentally prioritising a subset of the population and the method they need to use to access public services.
So, separating out the different meanings of the word digital can reduce confusion and enable teams to meet a larger set of needs.
Digital is not the only word that has multiple meanings
And finally. Obviously digital is not the only word that can be loaded with multiple meanings. Just try asking people what they mean by terms like ‘AI’, ‘product”, ‘policy’, ‘personalisation’ or ‘digital identity’ if you really want to have my kind of ‘fun’.
But ‘digital’ is one of the key ones and there’s at least three definitions regularly in use. Understanding what other people mean by it and aligning on a common meaning can be a useful thing to do.
