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

Abstract

The paper is complementary with papers [1, 2, 3] which aims were to advance information society research by examining and understanding the information and communication technologies (ICT) adoption within government units in the context of the sustainable information society (SIS). In [4] the impact of ICT adoption on sustainability within government units was explored, whereas this paper extends these research findings by new insights into SIS measurement. The aim of this paper is to propose an approach to the measurement of two constructs shaping SIS, i.e. ICT adoption and sustainability within government units. ICT adoption is described by four sub-constructs, 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 within government units. 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 185 government units were analyzed. We proposed and calculated five synthetic indicators 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-cultural, and political sustainability. The research revealed that the medium level of ICT adoption index, i.e. in the interval (0.34, 0.68], is in the largest share of examined government units (68.6%). With regard to sustainability, the medium level of sustainability index is in the interval (0.32, 0.64] and is characteristic for 71.2% of government units. Furthermore, the high levels of ICT adoption and sustainability indexes exceeding the value of 0.68 for ICT adoption and 0.64 for sustainability are indicated by 17.0% and 14.4% of government units respectively.