1 Introduction In 2010, the European Commission (EC) adopted the Europe 20201 strategy designed to help the economy of the European Union (EU) escape the crisis and prepare for the challenges of the next decade. The baseline is that the EU needs thorough changes to preserve its competitiveness and standard of living. The strategy’s principal objective is to turn the EU’s economy into one that is smart, sustainable and inclusive. It sets measurable overall objectives that the Member States (MS), in tailoring the strategy to their particular situation, should translate into their national targets and trajectories. The Europe 2020 Strategy contains seven flagship initiatives to catalyse progress under priority topics. These initiatives include the Digital Agenda for Europe2 (DAE3), which concerns the key role of information and communication technologies (ICT) in the efforts to achieve strategic objectives. The general objective of the DAE is to ensure that the uniform digital market based on fast and ultrafast internet connections and interoperable applications results in lasting economic and social advantages. The DAE foresees that the Member States will adopt their own strategic frameworks to achieve the DAE objectives. This framework can be set up by a single comprehensive strategic document or by several coordinated strategies. Due to the adverse economic conditions and rapidly changing development factors since the implementation of the DAE, Slovenia has not yet fully taken up the development opportunities offered by ICT. The efforts to place the development of an information society among development priorities have been unsuccessful, so promotional activities are weak, incoherent, and lacking development resources and the necessary support. The delays in this area unavoidably cause negative consequences in several other development fields; above all, Slovenia loses competitiveness in terms of several standards compared to other EU Member States. The implementation of DAE showed weaknesses and the need for the renewal of strategic orientations at the EU level. The current fragmentation of digital markets across the Member States and their small size in comparison with domestic markets prevents European economies from creating the economy of scale, increases the costs of appearance in these markets, prolongs the time for market entry, hinders business cooperation, the flow of ideas and innovation. At the same time these limits make the EU as a business environment less and less attractive for global multinational enterprises. In view of the prominent horizontal effect of digitisation, negative consequences refer to most industrial sectors and not only to the ICT sector, as well as to European society as a whole, of course. In order to eliminate system deficiencies and accelerate development in this field, the EC published the Digital Single Market Strategy4 for Europe in 2015 as a sequel to DAE; the document drafts the measures for a more efficient use of digital technologies to help the population and enterprises use the opportunities enabled by these technologies. In the context of digital space - regardless of whether we mean the private or business aspect - the key strategic task is to abolish restrictions that prevent the creation of a uniform European digital market. Since the development of the digital society has not proved equally successful in all EU countries and since geographic and national borders remain an obstacle to the creation of a fully functioning digital market, measures for a more balanced 1Europe 2020 - A strategy for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth - COM(2010)2020. Agenda for Europe – COM(2010)245. 3 http://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/ 4 http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-15-4653_sl.htm 2Digital 4 DIGITAL SLOVENIA 2020 - Development strategy for the information society until 2020