Digitalization of Business as a Factor of Increasing its Competitiveness

Abstract

Digital transformation is the renewal of business processes using modern technologies to accelerate productivity and increase efficiency. The dynamics of the number of publications on this topic demonstrates an increase in interest in the problem, so from one article indexed in the Scopus database in 2013, their number in 2021 increased to 676 papers. At the same time, the dependence of a company’s competitiveness on the digital transformation of business the assessment remains a niche in the research field, some scientists have only paid attention to the analysis of the digital competitiveness of companies. In this regard, we believe that our research may arouse the interest of the scientific community. The purpose of the article is to prove the existence of a relationship between the level of competitiveness of a business and the degree of its digital transformation, as well as to identify ways to stimulate the business digital transformation. Based on the correlation analysis, the author studied the relationship between the levels of digital and global competitiveness of the countries of the world, and found out the significant influence of not only technological, but also institutional factors on global competitiveness. Using the example of 63 countries studied, using regression analysis, the decisive factors of digital competitiveness were identified: factors of scientific productivity, quality of technological infrastructure, business flexibility and integration of IT into social and business processes. The mechanism of increasing business flexibility in three areas of improvement, strategic, organizational and operational, is defined. Strategic business flexibility is crucial for creating a commercially viable business, organizational flexibility is aimed at optimizing business processes in order to accelerate business adaptation to new market challenges, operational flexibility implies the ability to quickly and efficiently achieve measurable results. The author substantiates that top managers can take advantage by turning to information technologies as the main tool for achieving business flexibility, and suggests an algorithm for ensuring business flexibility by modernizing the IT architecture.