Digitization of German Enterprises in the Production Sector - Do they know how 'digitized' they are?

摘要

Due to an ongoing digitization of everyday life and fast changes in the business environment, enterprises face numerous external and internal challenges. In order to stay competitive, especially SMEs require effective information and communication technology (ICT) use as well as a deep understanding of ICT in general and in digital innovation in particular. In this paper, we reveal the self-assessment of 239 companies regarding their own digitization level and ICT use compared to the number of implemented enterprise systems. We could show that many companies, especially smaller companies, overestimate themselves in terms of ICT use and their level of digitization. It could become critical for those companies to understand their current positions to be able to cope with the ongoing digitization in different business fields. We, therefore, provide two different results for future research, including a proposal for a maturity model supporting evaluation of the enterprises' software and hardware infrastructures.