A study conducted by Deloitte for Siemens, showed that Portugal sits in 15th place on the 'digital maturity' index of companies, from the total of 29 European countries.
The study’s conclusion was that Portuguese companies are "among the group of countries in transition, including countries like France, Spain and the Czech Republic."
The study looked at ‘digital readiness’ within each country’s business sector to promote corporate change regarding the environment and infrastructure. In these categories, Portugal was "above average", but the result for Portuguese companies’ human resources readiness to face new challenges was "significantly below the average."
The 'environment' classification looked at how easy it was to do business in Portugal, which was marked down due to the lack of an effective legal framework to facilitate the protection of intellectual property and to prevent digital piracy.
The 'above average' score for infrastructure was due to the investment in communications infrastructure in the past decade.
But the workforce did not score highly; "on the other hand, the human resources score is low, mainly due to lack of experience of the workforce in the use of digital tools and the difficulties companies face in recruiting skilled professionals."
Among the findings it was noted that "Portugal has a fairly good environment to support digital transformation for companies, but they remain hesitant to invest and exploit digital opportunities."
Rui Costa, Siemens CIO, argued that Portuguese companies are at the right point to make the leap towards growth and that he knows companies that are "betting on digital change and that they have confirmed that this strategy will bring clear gains in productivity, competitiveness and cost reductions.
Recruitment of professional, well trained staff is an increasing problem as hundreds of thousands of the better trained, qualified young and digitally competent have moved to northern European employment hot-spots during the years of austerity, from which only half are expected to return during their working lives.
