Prioritizing Barriers to Digital Transformation in, Azerbaijan
Digital transformation is widely viewed as a productivity and competitiveness imperative, yet its diffusion remains uneven in many emerging economies where firms face binding constraints in skills, finance, infrastructure, governance, and digital trust. This article develops an evidence-based prioritization of digital transformation barriers for the Republic of Azerbaijan by integrating enterprise survey evidence with expert consensus building and multi-criteria decision-making. The empirical base combines a 2024 survey of 450 enterprises (200 medium and large firms and 250 SMEs) across key industries with a two-round Delphi exercise involving 15 experts from government, ICT industry, business associations, and academia. Barriers are prioritized using a hybrid Delphi-TOPSIS model under three implementation-oriented criteria (expected impact, feasibility, and cost/risk). The revised version strengthens the methodological explanation by clarifying Delphi expert-selection filters, expanding the interpretation of the methods section, adding scenario-based robustness discussion, and linking observable adoption indicators such as ERP/CRM and cloud use to barrier severity. Results indicate that the shortage of qualified digital personnel is the most critical barrier (closeness coefficient 0.78), followed by limited financial resources for digital investments (0.75), weak regional digital infrastructure (0.62), cybersecurity readiness gaps (0.59), and organizational resistance to change (0.55). The ranking implies that Azerbaijan’s transition is constrained less by connectivity alone than by complementary intangible inputs - skills, financing and managerial capability - that determine firms’ absorptive capacity. The study contributes a context-specific prioritization and validation procedure suitable for emerging economies and translates rankings into targeted policy and managerial packages, including a sequenced implementation roadmap and monitoring indicators.