What is visible without asking the firm
Digitalisation is usually measured with a questionnaire: you ask the owner how they are doing and they answer. That has three faults. Only those with something to say reply. They rate themselves better than reality. And those with nothing do not reply at all — so the very group the exercise exists for is missing from the result.
The other route is to look outward rather than inward. Is there a website? Does it load on a phone? Can you click through to anything? Is the firm on maps? Does it have reviews? None of this needs an answer from the owner — it needs you to look where the customer looks. You can check it for a firm that has never heard of you, and the same way for a thousand more.
Five dimensions and what decides each one
D1 · A working website. It exists and loads on a repeat attempt. It sounds obvious. It is also the line between a firm a customer can find and a firm that does not exist for a search engine.
D2 · Mobile usability. Someone looking for a tradesperson is typically on a phone, often outdoors and in a hurry. A site that cannot be operated on a phone is, for most enquiries, the same as no site.
D3 · A conversion element. An enquiry form or a clickable phone number. This separates a business card from a tool for winning work. A number set as an image cannot be dialled.
D4 · A Google Business profile. For local trades it often matters more than the website itself. The customer searches for a plumber in their town and gets a map, not links.
D5 · Reviews. At least some. For a service that travels by word of mouth, it is the only evidence an unknown customer has.
Why five, and why it does not add up to a 100-point index
The tempting move is a nought-to-hundred index with a weight on every item and one neat number at the end. Tempting, and wrong: those weights are invented by whoever builds the index, and nobody can defend them.
The European Commission does it differently and better. The digital intensity index is a plain unweighted count of technologies met out of twelve, with a threshold of four for the basic level. No weights, no arbitrariness. Five dimensions and a nought-to-five sum rest on the same principle.
Reporting by individual dimension matters more than the total anyway. "This many per cent of firms have no website at all" says more than "the mean score is 2.4".
The statistical blind spot: who European data does not see
The Eurostat survey on ICT usage in enterprises is mandatory for firms with ten or more employees. Collection for the nought-to-nine band is optional for member states and only some do it. The digital intensity index behind the Digital Decade target is computed exclusively from enterprises with ten or more employees.
Let us put it precisely, because it matters: I am not claiming Eurostat does not measure micro-enterprises. I am claiming they are not part of the mandatory, harmonised European data base — so their coverage is incomplete and not comparable across countries.
Meanwhile the Digital Decade target expects more than ninety per cent of European SMEs to reach at least basic digital intensity by 2030. Policy is aimed at a segment whose largest part stays outside measurement.
What the Czech numbers actually say
According to the State of the Digital Decade 2025 report, in 2024 some 70.81 per cent of Czech SMEs reached at least basic digital intensity, against an EU average of 72.91 per cent.
Two percentage points. Not a chasm. Czechia is not dramatically behind on business digitalisation — it sits just under the average and grows slightly slower. Anyone claiming otherwise is usually quoting an older version of the index. I did it myself at first and had to correct it.
At the same time it says nothing at all about the firms this article is about. Those are numbers for enterprises with ten or more employees. A plumber with two people is not in them.
What you can check yourself, today
Open your own firm on a phone, not on a computer. Walk the five points above and answer yes or no to each. The sum is your score, nought to five.
Two of the five cost nothing but time: a Google Business profile and a clickable phone number on the site. If you have neither, the cheapest possible improvement is within reach.
Data collection is running now — a stratified random sample of 800 to 1,000 firms in specialised construction activities drawn from the Czech ARES register, plus interviews with owners about why they do or do not build a digital presence. Results will go here when there are any. Until then you will find no numbers about trades micro-enterprises here, because none exist yet.
This piece came out of a specific engagement. The client name and their numbers are not in it and will not be — we publish only what holds generally.
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