Abstract:

The article concentrates of the problem of ICT usage by enterprises within the context of Industry 4.0 challenges. The main objective of the paper is to analyse heterogeneity in ICT utilisation by enterprises in the Central and Eastern European countries that joined the EU after the year 2004. The research is done for the years 2010-2018 and it is based on the Eurostat data. The presented  scientific problem is considered as a multi-criteria phenomenon. Thus, in the analysis a taxonomic approach was applied based on zero unitarization method. The method enabled to obtain a synthetic measure of development for the analysed phenomenon in the case of group of the countries under consideration. Based on the obtained measure a ranking of the countries was proposed. In the next step the natural breaks method was applied to group the countries into three homogenous subsets. On the one hand, the research confirmed relatively high dynamics of the phenomenon, especially in the group of the less developed economies. On the other hand, it also showed significant disparities between the countries, which are still present. The research can be applied for forming the guidelines and assessing the effectiveness of the national and the EU structural policies, which should aim at supporting utilisation of the Industry 4.0 potential and the conditions for fulfilling this objective.