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Synthetic Indexes for a Sustainable Information Society: Measuring ICT Adoption and Sustainability in Polish Enterprises

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Information Technology for Management. Ongoing Research and Development (ISM 2017, AITM 2017)

Abstract

This paper is complementary with two published paper [1, 2] and advances information society research by examining and understanding the information and communication technologies (ICT) adoption in enterprises in the context of the sustainable information society (SIS). Its aim is to propose an approach to the measurement of two constructs shaping SIS, i.e. ICT adoption and sustainability in enterprises. ICT adoption is described by four components, i.e. ICT outlay, information culture, ICT management, and ICT quality, whereas sustainability is composed of ecological, economic, socio-cultural, and political sustainability. This study employs a quantitative approach and, additionally, Hellwig’s taxonomic measure of development is adopted for multivariate comparative analyses to evaluate ICT adoption and sustainability in enterprises. A value of the Hellwig’s synthetic indicator can be in the interval [0, 1] where a higher value of the indicator means that the object is closer to the pattern. The survey questionnaires were used and data collected from 394 enterprises were analyzed. We proposed and calculated five synthetic indexes for measuring ICT adoption, i.e. ICT adoption index and sub-indexes of ICT outlay, information culture, ICT management, and ICT quality as well as five synthetic indexes for evaluating sustainability, i.e. sustainability index and sub-indexes of ecological, economic, socio-culture, and political sustainability. The research revealed that in the largest number of examined enterprises (67%) the levels of ICT adoption and sustainability indexes are at the medium levels, i.e. in the interval (0.39, 0.79]. However, the high levels of ICT adoption and sustainability indexes exceeding value of 0.79 are indicated in, respectively 15.7% and 17.3% of enterprises.

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Acknowledgement

I wish to express my sincere gratitude to my friend Maria Jadamus-Hacura for helping with statistical analysis.

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Correspondence to Ewa Ziemba .

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Ziemba, E. (2018). Synthetic Indexes for a Sustainable Information Society: Measuring ICT Adoption and Sustainability in Polish Enterprises. In: Ziemba, E. (eds) Information Technology for Management. Ongoing Research and Development. ISM AITM 2017 2017. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 311. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77721-4_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77721-4_9

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