Globally, digital solutions are gaining prominence and their prevalence and proliferation is evident by the rate of adoption by the masses. Organizations in government, civil, commercial and business domains are increasingly adopting digital to reach out to customers and impact them in ways that were not possible earlier. Digital technologies are far more pervasive now and their mass adoption has enabled information generation, and application in the form of information technology in different areas. The corner stone of digital technologies has been the creation, manipulation, and enhancement of meaningful information which significantly change the way organizations engage with their customers. Presently, there are practices, approaches, methods, life-cycle processes, frameworks, methodologies that help organizations in synthesizing, evaluating and implementing digital technologies in their respective areas of business. There are model based engineering and architecting approaches that have been found to be useful in computer-aided-generation of software systems from an expression of corresponding models. In all these situations, what comes to the fore is that most of the available approaches, follow the notion of “How to” do things rather than “why” it should be done, “what” should really be done” and “when” it should be done. This is further evident when we see that solutions in one area of application are not found to be useful in other areas. In other words, the digital solution patterns are useful for only one instance and are not useful for further instantiations. There are different schools of thought with regard to digital technologies and how businesses can utilize them. Gartner is of the view that the nexus of forces (Cloud, Mobile, Social, and Information) are the driving factors for digital technologies and related business. TCS is of the view that the digital five forces (Cloud, Big Data, Social, Mobility, and Robotics & Artificial intelligence) are the driving factors for digital technologies and related business. HBR is of the view that smart, connected, miniaturized devices (Internet of Things) are the driving force of digital technologies and related businesses. One thing that is evident from these views is that, all of them speak about the constituent parts but they do not say clearly: a) Why should these parts exists? b) Are these parts sufficient? c) How to put these parts together to form a whole? d) When should these parts be used? e) What is the evolution path of these parts? f) What could be evolution path of the whole? g) What is the underlying systems model for digital based solutions? This paper is an attempt to articulate the digital journey, the different levels of discourse in the digital journey and the possible evolution of the digital technologies to address the contextual knowledge needs of the human civilization. As an exemplar, the digital journey of supporting customer experiences design using digital technologies is taken up and illustrated in this paper.
