Digital and information readiness gaps in Latin American companies: a multi-country assessment
Keywords:
digital readiness; information management; organizational readiness; Latin America; explainable machine learning; means-ends decoupling; enterprise surveysAbstract
Objective. To examine whether digital readiness and operational information management capacity develop in parallel within Latin American companies across specific countries, and to identify the organizational characteristics associated with balanced and asymmetric readiness configurations. Design/Methodology/Approach. Microdata from 2,143 establishments with twenty or more employees—sourced from the 2023 World Bank Enterprise Surveys across Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Mexico, Paraguay, and Peru—were harmonized. A weighted cluster analysis was applied, and classification models were interpreted using Shapley values. The dimensional structure of both measures was validated via confirmatory factor analysis based on polychoric matrices. Results/Discussion. Both dimensions were positively associated according to correlational analyses. The "digitally advanced" profile persisted even when excluding structural zeros, albeit with a significantly higher informational centroid (38.67 vs. 10.09). National context, firm size, formal training, and quality certification were the most significant explanatory factors, although predictive discrimination was moderate (balanced accuracy ranging from 0.49 to 0.58). Conclusions. Digital adoption does not necessarily imply mature operational use of information, and readiness configurations remain strongly influenced by national context. The proposed gap represents a descriptive contrast between domains and should not be used as a ranking index for comparing countries. Originality/Value. This study proposes a joint, reproducible framework to detect the misalignment between digital capacity and information-based management, utilizing comparable firm-level microdata and explainable machine learning.
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Copyright (c) 2026 José Isaac Zablah, Lupe Carolina Espinosa, Lilian Elisa Sosa Díaz
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