There is hardly any area of our lives - or anywhere in Society or in business - where digital technologies have not made themselves indispensable. By now, the process by which the base technology has proliferated and made itself a universal, ever-present reality, culminating in the scale of its global distribution and structural influences on business and Society alike, has been compared with the process by which the industrially-developing countries adopted electrification towards the end of the 19th century.
Information & Communications Technologies - or "ICT" for short - exert a direct influence on the quality of business venues and on the perpetuation of employment and job protection into the future. The spin-offs from ICT developments tend to spread far beyond the confines of any field we care to consider and into all areas of life, making them an essential requirement for developing digital products and services.
ICT developments constitute the basis for all present-day key technologies: such developments are what we need to make machines smart, thus enabling industry-standard 4.0, self-driving cars, the smart infrastructure and what has become known as IoT: the "Internet of Things".
