Digital Transformation of Baubau City
Analysis of Archipelago Digital City Framework Based on Digital Competitiveness (EV-DCI 2020–2025)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.46891/kainawa.7.2025.45-59Keywords:
Digital Transformation, Digital Competitiveness, Archipelagic City, EV-DCI, Baubau CityAbstract
The digital transformation era has become a key determinant of regional development in achieving Indonesia's Golden Vision 2045 with targets of 9 million digital talents by 2030 and 82% internet penetration, yet paradoxical phenomena occur in Baubau City, which experiences significant digital competitiveness degradation despite Southeast Sulawesi Province's performance improvement. The research gap lies in the absence of adaptive digital transformation frameworks for archipelagic city characteristics in Eastern Indonesia and limited longitudinal studies on digital competitiveness degradation. The research questions examine the factual conditions of Baubau City's digital competitiveness and what digital transformation strategies should be developed to achieve an adaptive digital city vision. This study aims to analyze the factual conditions of Baubau City's digital competitiveness and formulate transformation strategies toward adaptive, sustainable digital cities with high digital literacy. The research methodology employs a qualitative descriptive-comparative approach with library research, analyzing East Ventures-Digital Competitiveness Index (EV-DCI) data for 2020–2025 through trend analysis, regional profiling, comparisons with Kendari City and national median, and gap analysis techniques. Findings reveal a drastic decline in EV-DCI scores from 45.9 (2024) to 35.8 (2025) with ranking 102 out of 157 cities, caused by five systemic factors: geographical fragmentation effects, infrastructure resilience gaps, market mechanism limitations, institutional coordination problems, and adaptive capacity constraints. Research results develop an "Archipelago Digital City Framework" integrating Digital Ecosystem Theory, Technology Adoption Theory, and Digital Government Theory as contextual solutions with a paradigm of transforming geographical challenges into digital innovation opportunities. Conclusions indicate the need for phased implementation with stabilization priorities for 2025–2026 and consolidation for 2027–2029 to achieve EV-DCI targets of 42–45 points, accompanied by recommendations for developing distributed innovation ecosystems and empirical mixed-method research for framework validation in other archipelagic cities.
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