OVERCOMING THE BARRIERS TO THE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION OF INDUSTRIAL ENTERPRISES THROUGH THE BUSINESS MODEL SELECTION MECHANISM

Abstract

The article describes the main barriers to digital transformation faced by industrial enterprises in various industries, such as: lack of appropriate funding, information security risks, insufficient digital skills of employees, insufficient maturity of current processes, internal resistance to change, insufficient awareness of managers, lack of certainty over the future of digital standards. To analyse the barriers, the author used a three-step approach, including a literature review, a primary research with representatives of the companies, and a qualitative comparative analysis that are based on the Kruskal – Wallis test and used to identify differences between groups of enterprises. To overcome the barriers identified by the author it was offered to use  a mechanism of a business model selection, which takes into account the assessment of obtained competitive advantages (improvement of operational, financial and technical efficiency), digital maturity (digital culture level, staff qualifications, the quality of business process organisation and access to digital infrastructure) and risks (non-receipt of expected income from business model implementation, information security, reputational and personnel). The novelty of the proposed business model selection mechanism for an industrial enterprise is to improve the classification and develop a multi-criteria mechanism for choosing a business model, which would be implemented using a knowledge-based system incorporating a fuzzy inference mechanism.