Digitalisation vs. Informatisation: Different Approaches to Governance Transformation

The twentieth century brought humanity radically new knowledge in form of electronics, informatics, and telecommunication technologies, which gave rise to cyberspace as a channel for data exchange, data storage, and as an enabler of new approaches to steering and controlling realworld systems. Thus-created new opportunities have been successfully deployed for the automation of processes in areas such as production, service provision, data exchange, navigation, logistics, etc., or for creating new possibilities through concepts of virtualisation, respectively. While this has led to radical transformations of paradigms in industry and free market service provision, the systems that make up modern states have been broadly spared of disruption by these technologies. Behind this backdrop, this contribution aims to discuss the differences between digitalization and informatization as two differing approaches to system transformation. The discussion is set in the context of societal governance, where digitalization is the main approach to modernisation. The focus on digitalisation and the lack of progress towards informatization in this field of interest is criticized, and the advantages of informatization are brought to attention.