Assessing the level of digital maturity of enterprises in the Central and Eastern European countries using the MCDM and Shannon’s entropy methods

Abstract

The process of global economic digitalization is a natural stage of evolutionary changes resulting from a dynamic development of information and communication technologies. Having appreciated the importance and advantages of digital transformation, individual countries began to strive to introduce it as soon as possible. In this context, it is important to study the level of digital maturity in Central and Eastern Europe, where the level of digitization is relatively low. This article assesses the level of digital readiness of enterprises in these countries based on 14 determinants characterizing the most important areas of the digitalization process. The research was carried out for 11 countries from the region, both for all and manufacturing enterprises. Multi-criteria analysis aimed at assessing the digital maturity of countries were performed using the Multi-Criteria Decision-Making methods (the TOPSIS, MOORA, VIKOR), and entropy methods for delineating the weights of the determinants. In order to obtain an unambiguous assessment of the determined digital maturity, the mean-rank method was applied. The method of multidimensional scaling allowed for the analysis of similarities between the countries in question. The results showed that the level of digital maturity in the Central and Eastern Europe countries varies greatly and is lower than in other European Union countries.