ICT Profiles of Russian Companies at the Industry Level: Resource Management Strategies

Abstract

A productive approach to analysing the Russian information and communication technologies landscape is focusing on commonly used industry-specific stable ICT combinations. At the corporate level, such combinations reflect companies’ ICT profiles, which the resource theory defines as the firm’s ability to create competitive advantages by making use of resource complementarity. Unlike previous studies, the authors didn’t use ICT combinations suggested by experts, but applied a specially designed tool based on machine learning techniques to automatically search for interconnected ICTs, which allowed to identify stable technology combinations applied by numerous companies in various industries.

ICT profiles were identified by analysing the relationships between a wide variety of relevant technologies ranging from basic infrastructure to AI-based business performance management systems. The final dataset included 110 ICTs applied by over 29,000 companies in 31 industries in 2006-2022. The analysis allowed to draw the following conclusions: (1) typical for most industries profile comprises a combination of BPM and SaaS systems; (2) insurance and finance have the highest diversity and complexity of ICT profiles; (3) supplementing ICT profiles with AI-based solutions holds great potential for Russian companies; (4) implementing ICT profiles affects companies' financial performance; albeit quite differently in different industries.