Digitalization: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow Rolf Dornberger, Terry Inglese, Safak Korkut and Vivienne Jia Zhong Abstract The rapid development of digital technologies is making organizations rethink their business models and processes. This is resulting in a massive digital transformation of the economy and society. New trends are emerging at a fast pace and some of them might vanish soon. In order to investigate the opportunities and challenges behind these trends and make a sound prediction of their further develop- ment, it is necessary to understand the evolution of information and communication technology, which was and still is intended to provide support in the management of personal and business tasks. For this purpose, we present our model "Digitalization: Yesterday, today and tomorrow", which provides a brief summary of the develop- ment and rise of computational technology, resulting in changes in the interaction both of humans with computers and between humans and computers, and shows how individuals, business and the government have been adapting to these changes. We identified four streams of development: Early Information Systems, the E-Business Applications, the Web 2.0 Revolution and the renaissance of the Artificial Intelli- gence; a fifth stream remains unnamed, as we do not yet know where these fast-paced developments will lead us. Keywords Digitalization · Information system · E-Business · Web 2.0 Artificial intelligence R. Dornberger (X) · T. Inglese · S. Korkut · V. J. Zhong Institute for Information Systems, University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland, Peter Merian-Strasse 86, 4002 Basel, Switzerland e-mail: rolf.dornberger@fhnw.ch T. Inglese e-mail: terry.inglese@fhnw.ch S. Korkut e-mail: safak.korkut@fhnw.ch V. J. Zhong e-mail: viviennejia.zhong@fhnw.ch 1 Springer International Publishing AG 2018 R. Dornberger (ed.), Business Information Systems and Technology 4.0, Studies in Systems, Decision and Control 141, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74322-6_1
2 R. Dornberger et al. 1 Introduction The world is changing, probably faster today than ever before in human history. If we use a pattern to visualize this statement figuratively, the change might be described as follows: In early human imagination, the world was considered to be flat and assumed to be a kind of two-dimensional disk, where you can fall off its edge. Around 500 B.C., the Greek philosopher Aristotle spoke of the world as being a globe, the diameter of which Eratosthenes (approx. two centuries later) calculated very roughly and identified the earth as a three-dimensional shape without edges. However, it was not until 2,000 years later that Fernão de Magalhães was able to experimentally prove its globe shape by circumnavigating the earth at the beginning of the 16th century. Five hundred years later, in the course of globalization, Thomas Friedman declared that "The world is flat" (Friedman 2005), thus returning to the idea of an economically interconnected, but flat, two-dimensional world. Moreover, it is predicted today that "we live in exponential times" (Demirdjian 2015), suggesting that our world has shrunk to a one-dimensional exponential curve, where key issues are expanding at exponential speed and growth. The pattern from a geographically 2D flat world via a 3D round globe back