What indicators can measure the digital maturity of an organization or a country in 2025? With expanded regulatory obligations, requirements for digital sobriety, and shifts in sought-after skills, the stakes of digital technology and computing are now viewed through concrete, verifiable, and sometimes binding criteria.
Digital Sobriety and Support for SMEs: What the OECD 2024 Report Changes
The OECD report “Digital 2025,” published in November 2024, marks a turning point in how states support the digital transformation of businesses. Several member countries, including France, Canada, and South Korea, now condition their support for SMEs on criteria of digital sobriety. In practical terms, this means requirements for eco-design of services, limiting the storage of unused data, and streamlining IT infrastructures.
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This conditioning changes the game for IT departments. A digitalization project that would have been funded unconditionally two years ago must now incorporate environmental indicators from its inception. The resources available on tic-et-net.org allow tracking these regulatory developments that affect both large organizations and small businesses.
The impact is twofold: companies must rethink their use of cloud and storage technologies, while IT providers adapt their offerings to meet these new requirements. Digital sobriety is no longer a marketing argument; it is a criterion for eligibility for public funding.
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NIS2 Directive and IT Security: Before/After Comparison for Companies
The NIS2 directive, gradually transposed into EU member states since late 2024, redefines the scope of organizations subject to strict cybersecurity obligations. The table below summarizes the main changes.
| Criterion | Before NIS2 | After NIS2 |
|---|---|---|
| Concerned Companies | Essential service operators (energy, transport, health) | ESNs, hosting providers, cloud platforms, medium-sized data center operators |
| Risk Management | Sectoral recommendations | Strengthened obligations with regular oversight |
| Incident Response | Voluntary or sectoral notification | Mandatory notification within strict deadlines |
| Business Continuity | Recommended plans | Required and audited plans |
Previously non-critical structures are now classified as “essential” or “important.” A medium-sized ESN that hosts its clients’ data falls within the scope, with the same types of obligations as a telecom operator.
For IT departments, this implies investments in training, incident detection tools, and continuity plans. Data security is no longer limited to large companies in critical sectors.
Digital Skills in 2025: From Technical to Data and AI
The 2024 ITU report on digital skills highlights a significant shift in needs. Purely technical skills (system administration, traditional web development) remain in demand, but mastery of data and artificial intelligence is becoming the primary recruitment criterion in many sectors.
This shift is reflected in three observable trends in the training and employment market:
- Profiles capable of leveraging massive datasets (data analysts, data engineers) are sought well beyond the technology sector, particularly in health, logistics, and local authorities.
- Basic digital literacy (understanding algorithms, notions of cybersecurity, critical reading of information) is expected from all employees, not just those in IT services.
- Short, certifying training programs are gaining ground over long courses, driven by the need for rapid retraining in changing sectors.
However, simply knowing how to use a tool no longer constitutes a digital skill. Digital education, as defined in European public policies, aims to train citizens capable of understanding the underlying mechanisms: how recommendation algorithms work, the stakes of personal data collection, and the logic of open-source software in the face of web actor concentration.
Environmental Impact of Digital Technology: A Standalone IT Issue
The environmental question is no longer peripheral in IT projects. The conditioning of public aid to digital sobriety, mentioned earlier, is set against a backdrop where the carbon footprint of digital infrastructures is increasingly monitored by regulators.
Companies deploying cloud solutions or managing data centers must integrate this dimension from the design phase. This involves choosing suppliers committed to reducing their energy consumption, regularly deleting obsolete data, and optimizing processing flows.
This convergence between IT and environmental responsibility redefines the role of IT teams. They are no longer just responsible for technical performance but also for the environmental compliance of the systems they manage. The OECD guide and the NIS2 directive share this common point: digital governance now encompasses extra-technical criteria, whether related to security, sobriety, or team training.
The stakes of digital technology and computing are now measured against three mutually reinforcing indicators: regulatory compliance (NIS2), environmental conditionality of funding (OECD), and skills adaptation (ITU). These three axes structure the decisions of IT departments for the coming years.