Abstract
Digitalization is nowadays one of the fastest developing processes. The adoption of digital technologies can provide innumerous opportunities for the organizations to evolve and gain competitive advantage by leveraging technologies to respond to dynamic expectations and demands. Information about the country's digitalization level is essential to decision makers in both public and private organizations. It can present insights into which areas need the most investment, and furthermore to gain feedback on the outcomes of these investments. To assess the evolution of this process in different countries, various indexes were proposed and employed by different corporations. Indexes are analyzed thoroughly by their structure, coverage, weights, methodology, and ranking. The result of the practical work is an equivalence table which shows the percentage of their similarity. Additionally, a new digitalization index is proposed, based on the result of the previous comparison, which can be applied to analyze both public and private sector of the country's digitalization level.
TopIntroduction
Digitalization is becoming an inevitable part of the growth of entrepreneurship in the modern world (Satalkina & Steiner, 2020; Ungureanu, 2021). Digitalization assessment is not yet used in all countries and prevents them from leading in innovation, multi-channel service delivery and advancement in e-commerce and the digital economy (Shin, Ho & Pak, 2020). Although digital technologies still do not have a recognized model for evaluating economic effects, growth and development (Stremousova & Buchinskaia, 2019), many studies have been carried out about the impact of the digital transition on specific sectors and processes of the economy (Tarasova, Averina & Pecherskaya, 2020). This work focuses on the nature of digitalization and the type of assessments that are carried out on digitalization processes. For this, it is important to define the digitalization, compare digitalization rates and find the most ideal among the suggested variants (Kotarba, 2017). Four digital indexes were chosen, considering their importance and nature. DESI (European Union) and the ICT Development Index (International Telecommunications Union) which belong to the public sector and the DiGiX (BBVA) and CISCO Digital Readiness (CISCO) to the private sector. Digital indices vary geographically and are compared by territory (Konovalova, Kuzmina & Zhironkin, 2020). The assessment of digitalization in different regions can vary dramatically due to political situations, ideologies, cultures and levels of development (Petrenko et al., 2017). As digitalization is a recent process (Lederer, Knapp & Schott, 2017), the research is based on the latest data and definitions. This work can be applied to all demographic groups and communities. The most specific aspect is to develop an ideal digital assessment of the country, company and location. This is done through the verification of equivalence between the most used digital indexes and the conclusion of the most important aspects for this process (Kotarba, 2017).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Digital Economy: Describes an economic system where the use of information and communication technology is widespread.
Cisco Digital Readiness Index: Was developed to holistically measure a country’s level of digital readiness.
Digitalization: Is the sociotechnical process of leveraging digitized products or systems to develop new organizational.
Digital Transformation: Is the process that is used to restructure economies, organizations and society.
DiGiX Digitalization Index: Was created by BBVA company (Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentina) and it is considered as one of the largest financial institutions of the world.
ICT Development Index (IDI): Is a composite index that has been reported, since 2009, by the International Telecommunication Union.
Digital Economy and Society Index: (DESI): Is a composite index prepared annually by the European Commission since 2015 that seeks to assess the digital competitiveness of Member States, following its evolution over time.
Digitization: Is the technical process of converting analogue signals to digital signals.