The equivalence between digitalization indexes

Abstract

Digitalization is nowadays one of the fastest developing processes. The adoption of digital technologies can provide numerous opportunities for the organizations to evolve and gain competitive advantage by leveraging of technologies in order to respond to dynamic expectations and demands. Information about the country digitalization level is essential to decision makers in both public and private organizations. It can present insights on which areas need the most investment, and furthermore to gain feedback on the outcomes of these investments. For companies, it can create a certain predictability on which products and services will be required the most. To assess the evolution of this process in each country, various indexes were proposed and employed by different corporations. The information and methodology used by these indexes is diverse and there was the need to analyze the correlation between them. The purpose of this research is to investigate the digitalization of public and private sector, identify the most used digitalization indexes and test their equivalences. The compared indexes are: Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI), Digitalization Index (DiGiX), ICT Development Index (IDI) and Cisco Digital Readiness Index. DESI and IDI are used by public organizations. DiGiX and CISCO are used by private companies. Comparing two sectors highlights the most common factors of digital evaluation. Indexes are analyzed thoroughly by their structure, coverage, weights, methodology and ranking. Based on this information, a practical comparison between the indicators and subindicators of indexes is performed. The result of the practical work is the correlation table with equivalences between DESI, DiGiX, IDI and CISCO indexes, which shows the percentage of their alikeness. 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.