XXI. 21st century companies must have the flexibility and capacity to respond to a constantly and rapidly changing environment. However, small and medium-sized enterprises in Europe have a long way to go in the process of digital transformation.
 
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the European Union’s Star and Arco programs aimed to promote the use of technology among Spain’s goals. Some initiatives in this area sought to spread the use of computer and telecommunications companies, especially by small businesses, to modernize their processes and make their business models more competitive. At the time there was no talk of cloud, blockchain, big data or IoT, but rather the Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN), the first communication system. This system allowed the transmission of voice and data from the Ibertex service or the Exchange. It was the prehistory of the digital revolution. The Internet would begin to expand in the second half of the decade, and the world has accelerated the pace of transformation in the coming years.

Throughout the digitization process, companies are one of the priority axes. The incorporation of technology into corporate processes is seen as an essential competitive factor in the 21st century. to survive in the 21st century network economy. Initially, three decades ago, there was talk of introducing computers and an Internet connection in companies, and it was a big step forward to have an official website. Today all this is not enough. The current debate is about the collection of millions of data on the Internet of Things, the exploitation of such large amounts of data, both to optimize internal processes and to segment markets using artificial intelligence.
 
What was once thought of as a mere process of modernizing or computerizing companies is now a profound metamorphosis of business models. The process can lead to renewal processes and organizational structures to deal with environments that are much more complex. It’s called digital transformation, a very popular term that is on everyone’s lips, but it’s something broader than introducing technology within the company.

What is digital transformation

Over the past two decades, many definitions of digital transformation have been drawn in academic circles, but these ideas seem to encompass the following components:

•  It’s something that changes a company’s organizational processes, both in terms of the basics and how they create value and how the supply chain is organized. In this new framework, the information gathered is analyzed and transformed into actions to end up guiding business decisions.
• There is no doubt that the introduction of technological innovations in the company is one of the basic dimensions associated with this period. In the field of digital media for the company, there is a tendency to automate tasks and processes.
• Finally, the digital transformation also addresses the social perspective, through networks, through new digital means of communication, the intensive use of information for the hypersegmented analysis of demand and the construction of personalized value propositions for the customer.