Extraordinary change is taking place throughout the insurance industry and everything that surrounds it.

Related: The critical components of insurance digital transformation

The whole world is going digital. It's the new reality, and there is no getting around it. But just the word or even the idea of digital has many people, insurers included, pondering the basic and fundamental questions:

• Why do we need to be digital?
• How do we go digital?
• What, exactly, is digital anyway?

To get a visual of what digital means for insurance, look through the lens of digital transformation.

Defining digital

Defining digital is important because it's a very broad topic with far-reaching implications. Simply put (and without getting into the science behind it), digital is way of doing things. And becoming digital is a state that will be required for moving around in the digital world: communicating, shopping, traveling, doing business, keeping a competitive edge and much, much more.

Going digital

Digital is such a broad concept that it is easy to get too narrowly focused on just one part of the everything that makes up digital. For example, digital is a format for storing assets of many kinds; it's a way of transmitting data and information from one place to another, and it's a way of interacting with data. But that's not all. The digitization of assets is just the first phase or step on a pathway that will lead to the next phase of digital: creating the digital experience.