Digital transformation is today discussed at every company in Serbia, and many of them have seriously embarked on that transformative journey
As a driver of business in Serbia, digitalisation blossomed in the first half of 2020, as a side effect of the pandemic, and the trend of adopting and further developing solutions and products continued swiftly, says Dell EMC Account Executive Vladimir Spasić.
“The opinion of the majority of businesspeople is that digital transformation and innovations are extremely important, while a large number of them also believe that they are among the conditions for making further advances and market development,” notes our interlocutor.
As the pace at which business is done has accelerated, so the adoption of various digital solutions has sped up, in order for companies to be more agile and able to respond to market demands. As an example of the speed at which such solutions are being adopted, Spasić gives the example of the large number of new companies that were “born” on the basis of digital solutions in the recent past and have raised their operations to a higher level, thus laying the groundwork for their own further progress. “They thereby encouraged all other companies in Serbia to accept the digital world as it is with great speed, to subordinate their operations to it and to generate additional services through future solutions,” says Spasić.
What can you conclude about the depth and breadth of digital transformation in Serbia on the basis of the trends that you observe?
Digital transformation, as a concept, is now present in all companies that find themselves on our market, whether they’re under private or state ownership. This implies a broader concept of the process and actions needing to be taken for a company to be digitally transformed. What we see in practise is that the digital transformation process is underway, and that the process itself isn’t only an enduring one, but rather an almost endless one.
What we see in practise is that the digital transformation process is underway, and that the process itself isn’t only an enduring one, but rather an almost endless one
Depending on a company’s core area of activity, i.e., whether it operates in the banking sector, the real economy or the state sector, companies have achieved an enviable level of transformation, and we’ve been saying all this in the period since the outbreak of the pandemic, because that phenomenon caused this process to accelerate further. Applications, paperless processes, online ordering, delivery etc. all experienced expansion during the pandemic and ensured digital transformation’s further growth.
How important to speeding up digitalisation trends has the development of e-government services for citizens and businesses been?
Globally, digitalisation is a consequence of the constant and continuous development of IT, which has led to the reorganising of society and the global economy, the transformation of existing professions and the emergence of new ones, and the creation of a more efficient system. The fact is that, until just a few years ago, you had to queue up to obtain a document, thus wasting your precious time. By forming a team that deals with e-services, the state ensured a much faster service and communication with the state for citizens.
As those services became active, citizens requiring some service from the state became aware of the existence of that service and began utilising it. It was necessary for citizens to be digitally literate to use the services. On the flip side, e-government services are also used by businesses, which were already digitally literate, although e-gov services additionally accelerated the flow of information between the economy and e-government, thus additionally promoting the development of digitalisation. So, e-government services have contributed significantly to both the development of digitalisation among companies and the development of digital literacy among citizens.