What does it take to be a truly digital business? What does digital business mean to your customers and your company? Answering these questions might prove key to competing in this new online world.

 On July 14th, IBM Big Data hosted an online discussion through the CrowdChat website on the topic of “steps along the way in the digital business journey.” The guest list included IBM’s James Kobielus, Big Data evangelist; Jonathan Sloan, senior certified executive software IT specialist and team lead for data analytics on the IBM System z platform; and Mark Simmonds, enterprise architect and senior product marketing manager, IBM Software Group. A number of other voices from the tech community also attended.

The discussion was based around seven questions put to the guests and the audience about digital businesses and how they work.

How do you define a digital business?

While the panel of guests and audience had their own ideas about what it means to be a digital business, the consensus opinion focused on data. The gathering, understanding and use of data to engage customers and optimize business practices seemed to be the hallmark of a digital business. As Jonathan Sloan said, “The digital business can take advantage of all this content to provide customized offers/solutions/products which a person would be interested in at that point in time.”

 Chat attendees also stressed the importance of being connected to customers through social media and to employees by internal communications. “How do you define a digital business? I guess I would have to say it is the interconnected business,” Mark Simmonds said.

Source: http://siliconangle.com