From keeping in touch with our friends by Facebook to managing our money via online banking, we now take it for granted that the digital world is changing our lives.
Despite this, much remains to be done to ensure that the UK economy invests in information and communications technologies (ICT) to create further competitive advantage across all sectors in the economy.
That is the conclusion from last month’s publication of the 2016 Global Information Technology Report by the World Economic Forum (WEF) which examined the level of preparedness of 139 countries to take advantage of the opportunities presented by emerging technologies and the digital economy.
Whilst the UK is in the top 10, it is still behind countries such as Singapore, Finland and Sweden when it comes to digital readiness.
However, there are a number of important lessons from these leading digital nations that could help us to catch up.
The report suggests that innovation – which is so critical to developing competitive economies – will be changed by the digital revolution.
Rather than relying on traditional research and development (R&D) to create new patents that can then be exploited as many organisations currently do, it will instead help to create new business models that will continue to transform sectors as diverse as banking, transport, entertainment and education.
This will result in businesses of all sizes having to face increasing pressure to innovate continuously. Despite this, there is evidence that firms are slower at adopting ICT and, more relevantly, firms are not changing quickly enough.
In fact, whereas there are a growing number of users for digital products and services, the report suggests that this increasing demand is only being met by a small number of companies.
This presents a challenge to encourage greater digital entrepreneurship across our economy and to ensure that our young people have the necessary digital skills to contribute to this.
More needs to be done to ensure that more UK firms enter the market as the evidence shows that companies that do adopt digital technologies will find themselves with a fast-growing connected consumer base.
In that respect, presentations by a number of digital start-ups at the first ever Wales Start Up Awards shortlisting interviews last week showed that there is enormous potential here in this sector.
These firms included DevOps-Guys, which transforms and accelerates the way that organisations deliver software; Stockomendation, based in Llandudno and the world’s only stock tip aggregation and comparison platform; and EchoSec, which has created a location-based search platform that provides public safety, security, journalism and intelligence professionals with real-time knowledge gathered from publicly available social media posts.
Equally as important is addressing the lack of investment by the public sector in the digital economy, which means that whilst the numbers involved in the digital economy are increasing, government efforts at adopting new solutions to impact upon society is still well behind expectations.
Certainly, getting the Welsh Government, local authorities and other public bodies to use more ICT to more efficiently provide services to citizens is an important area where digital technologies can clearly make a real difference.
With economies and societies changing quickly as a result of new digital technologies, there must be new frameworks put into place to enable governments and businesses to maximise any opportunities that may arise.
In particular, new types of leadership, governance and behaviours must be established that not only appreciate the significance of these changes but, more importantly, move quickly to take advantage of changing circumstances.
For example, politicians must ensure that governments at a national, regional and local level create a business environment that allows firms to react speedily to new developments.
This includes making it easier to open a new digital business, support to bring products and services to market, and facilitating ICT adoption by creating a world-class infrastructure.
But to do this successfully, we need to ensure that there is a high quality business and regulatory environment for growing the digital economy within the UK.
This, combined with the requisite skills and the best infrastructure will help to generate the maximum impact from ICT over the next few years
More importantly, this agenda can’t be left to just one part of society and if we are to maximise the impact of the digital world, then business, government and the whole population must play their part in ensuring that it has a real and positive impact on both our economy and society in the future.
Certainly, ensuring that a Digital Wales happens should be one of the key priorities of the Welsh Government, private sector partners and society as whole over the next decade