In the second issue of Logistyka, in the article “E-business; global development trends,” the values of the global indicator called “The Sophistication Indicator,” calculated in 2002 for G7 countries as well as Ireland, Sweden, and Australia, were presented. Since this indicator will be calculated for all EU member states starting in 2005, this article presents the main methodological assumptions for the calculations.
Information and communication technologies have a huge impact on the development and competitiveness of the economy in every country. Therefore, both these technologies and new forms of conducting electronic business are already the subject of many economic analyses aimed at determining the scale and nature of their impact, which is evident not only in the activities of enterprises but also in society as a whole.
The first initiatives regarding the purpose of measuring the scope and significance of the electronic economy appeared during the European Council meeting in Seville in 2002, when work began on the eEurope 2005 Program. It was established that by 2005, Europe should have a “dynamic electronic environment,” and the primary indicator for measuring it was to be the “percentage of enterprises buying and selling via the Internet.” This indicator was later defined as the “percentage of e-commerce in the total trade of enterprises.” The same Program also defined that the electronic economy consists of “e-commerce (online purchases and sales) and changes in economic processes using digital technologies.” However, the earlier concept of the main indicator for measuring readiness for the electronic economy did not include such a scope. Nor did it accurately reflect the concept of a “dynamic electronic environment.” Therefore, together with Eurostat, further work was undertaken on a new definition of the e-business indicator, which—as it was aimed at assessing the readiness of European enterprises to conduct business electronically—was ultimately included in the eEurope 2005 Program.
In 2002, Eurostat conducted the first pilot study on the effectiveness of this indicator in EU countries. In accordance with the earlier intention of the OECD, its structure suggested that so-called e-readiness at the enterprise level is expressed in two dimensions. One includes the current technological capabilities of the enterprise, and the second—the organizational and functional changes necessary to use these technologies. Each of them had to be reflected in the construction of sub-indicators, one for infrastructure and defined as “ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) adoption by the enterprise,” and the second, reflecting organizational and functional factors as “ICT usage by the enterprise.”
Each of these sub-indicators had to be built as an aggregate of a certain number of components. In the first dimension (infrastructure), the following variables were included:
– percentages of computer applications, Internet access, websites, LAN, intra- and extranets, data transmission speeds
– security devices used
– staff access to ICT technologies.
The article comes from the magazine “Logistyka” 3/2004.