In light of the increased prevalence of new information technologies, such as cloud computing and machine learning, traditional IT measures based on physical IT capital have become less reliable, while IT complementary skills, tools, and human capital have become the new bottleneck. New IT technologies have thus, somewhat paradoxically, made the measurement of industry and firm-level IT sophistication and productivity significantly harder than they already were. We, therefore, build a novel set of industry-level IT metrics based on demands for IT skills and occupations in job postings from 2010 until 2022. By making these data publicly available to the IT research community, we believe that we can breathe new life into research using IT metrics to address various research questions. Our methodology to define these measures is general and simple enough to allow for future, and backward-compatible, extensions. We plan to build and release future versions in correspondence with the IT community. Strong correlations with the ‘official’ productivity measures validate our approach at the industry level and suggest their usefulness at the firm level, where no official measures for the US economy currently exist.

Download data (.csv)