Investigating the Enterprise Transition to Digital

Abstract

The article studies steps aimed at development of digital economy (DE). The key advantage of DE is wider access of enterprises of all types of industry to digital data as a resource of raising the economic activity efficiency. Transition to DE implies extended use of information technologies (IT) by the enterprise. The way to DE includes successive stages of using IT: automation, informatization and digitalization. Today many Russian enterprises are passing through the 1st stage of using IT. Factors of enterprise success in its transition to DE include accessibility of IT infrastructure, through technologies and digital business-models. By researching stages of using IT, DE factors the author identified the following signs of enterprise's transition to DE: 1) intensifying communication between the enterprise and external environment, which shows a serious extension of the number of entities and frequency of interactions with them; 2) automation of the interaction with external environment, mainly on the basis of digital platforms, which provide an opportunity to establish interaction without individuals' participation; 3) extended use of digital data in economic activity of the enterprise, which gives competitive advantages. The mentioned-above signs, on the one hand, show the enterprise's transition to DE, and on the other hand, make enterprises respond to digitalization challenges. These challenges cause the necessity to search for effective ways of managing a big number of channels and entities of interaction, changing its business-model supporting algorithmic interaction, using programs and calculation capacities to work with big data. Advantages of DE should be accessible for enterprises of all industries but not only IT-industry.

Keywords

• digitalization
• enterprise
• automation
• innovation
• information technologies