Assessing the Business Models of Ukrainian IT Companies

The characteristic features of Ukrainian IT companies are identified and analysed in the article. These characteristics are considered in the context of the application of business model elements from the point of view of creating value for customers of digital services and products. Data clustering was carried out in order to distinguish similar groups of IT companies. The principles of evaluating the value of IT enterprise products and the effectiveness of the applied business models were developed based on cluster analysis. Using the k-means method, clustering according to the following groups of indicators was carried out: the share of the various types of industry of customers of the company’s services/products in relation to the total volume; the share of types of services provided by the enterprise in relation to the total volume; the number of IT specialists at a given enterprise, taking into account the share comprising those registered in Ukraine; and the share in the client base of enterprises of certain categories (based on annual turnover). The calculation of the optimal number of clusters was carried out using the elbow method and the simplified silhouette estimation method. In the homogeneous groups formed by the applied business models, an analysis of the connections between these elements was carried out. It has been shown that the main factors in the creation of the value of IT products on the global market are the ability to provide high-quality services (a spectrum of services provided); the ability to provide services to certain types of industries; as well as the ability to form a national or transnational team of specialists that work towards the previous two factors. To evaluate the effectiveness of the applied business models, the value of the average declared cost of an hour of project implementation work, as well as the spectrum of the client base by categories of financial turnover (small, medium-sized or large businesses) are proposed. Given the state of the national economy and the prevailing transnational activity of a large share of Ukrainian IT companies, the proporion of employees registered in Ukraine is an equally important factor in assessing the effectiveness of the business model. It has been shown that the most effective business models of IT enterprises are those that ensure the involvement of professionals in a team, capable of providing high quality of a sufficiently narrow range of services to a medium range of industry types, and also create the possibility of a permanent improvement in employee qualifications in order to provide unique services. Business models that ensure the involvement of highly qualified managers from countries with developed economies in order to attract the client base of large and medium-sized businesses are also effective. The results of the research can be useful for adjusting the business models of IT enterprises in order to increase their efficiency by ensuring the possibility of providing services which cost above the average global market level and optimising the client base.