Diagnosis of readiness of Russian regions for the digital technologies implementation

Digitalization and digital technologies are the main driver of the development of economic systems, expressed in the acceleration of the pace of technological change. The emergence and implementation of digital technologies and platforms increase the business innovative potential, transform existing organizations and industries, and brings regions to a new level of development and competitiveness. When digitalization, affecting on all life spheres, reaches a certain penetration level, it starts to play a significant role in sustainable development. The peculiarity of Russia, due to its federal structure, is the need to consider the levels of digitalization of individual regions, which depend on the digital technology, culture and literacy being implemented, while at the same time evaluate the effectiveness of the digitalization of our country. That is why the integral indicators of digital development, i.e., Russia's position in the world ratings, are not sufficiently informative due to the strong regional differentiation of its levels. The effective management of the digital transformation of Russian regions at the federal level should be based on taking into account regional aspects of digitalization. The initial stage of this process is the analysis and diagnosis of regional differences, which determines the research relevance in this direction. The capabilities of Russian regions to implement and use digital technologies differ significantly due to their resource endowment in the development and implementation of digital technologies. The paper analyzes the role of digital technologies in the economy transformation, and clarifies the differences between the concepts of “advanced production technologies”, “digital technologies”, “end-to-end technologies” and “end-to-end digital technologies”. The relevance of taking into account regional peculiarities in the digital technologies' implementation has been substantiated. A methodology for rating Russian macro-regions by the level of readiness to implement digital technologies has been developed, allowing the rating of Russian macro-regions in absolute and relative terms, to assess the quality of dynamics of resource endowment indicators, on which depends the digital transformation of regions, organizations, business models and society as a whole. The rating can be used to develop methodological provisions on digital transformation management, identify cause-effect relationships and substantiate priority areas of development. Significant differentiation of the Russian Federation Federal Districts by the level of readiness to implement digital technologies has been revealed, which is indicative of the presence of a digital gap.