Taiwan, Korea, Hong Kong and New Zealand are placed 11th to 14th in the overall rankings.
One of the key pillars of the Index is ‘government usage’, where Asian countries have performed especially strongly. Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Bahrain and US took the first five places, and Malaysia was ranked the 6th.
The government usage index uses three variables: ‘the importance that governments place to carry out ICT policies for competitiveness and wellbeing”, “the effort they carry out to implement their visions for ICT development” and “the quality of governments’ delivery of online services.”
World Economic Forum has been collaborating with INSEAD, an international business school, on the study. The data analysed for the report came from both publicly available sources and an “Executive Opinion Survey” of over 15,000 executives. This year, the research covered 142 economies across the world.
Bruno Lanvin, Director of INSEAD eLabs, tells FutureGov that while the methodology has been revised to introduce a new set of impact-oriented metrics, the rankings did not change significantly. Both economic and social impacts have been measured in the study.
“Considering how ICT has become omnipresent, the focus has moved from access to making the best use of ICT in order to improve business innovation, governance, citizens’ political participation and social cohesion,” says Soumitra Dutta, the Roland Berger Chaired Professor of Business and Technology, INSEAD and co-editor of the report.
Lanvin specifically commended Singapore for being ‘the only country that remained in the top five since the creation of the Index in 2000’. In addition, for none of the categories in the report Singapore fared worse than 8th place in the world. Lanvin attributes government usage, leadership o ICT as well as quality of maths and science education to be the key factors for this stable performance
He says the areas that Singapore could improve further include economic impact of its ICT sector and fostering of intellectual property creation.
James Kang, Assistant Chief Executive of Singapore’s Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) tells FutureGov that Singapore Government takes rankings very seriously. “They helps us reaffirm the areas in which we have been doing well, and while continuing to improve in these areas, we will be very happy to share with our counterparts in other countries,” he elaborates. “On the other hand, the rankings allow us to identify areas where others are doing a better job, and we will learn from them.”
For instance, Singapore is keen to learn from Sweden about their internet penetration and development of some very sophisticated applications. A delegation from IDA visited Sweden last year to exchange ideas and experiences.
Singapore has been attaching great importance to ICT development. In addition to aligning ICT masterplan closely with the masterplan for national development, Singapore government invests more than S$1 billion (US$793 million) every year on ICT.
Kang reveals that the ICT industry has achieved S$70 billion (US$55 billion) revenue in 2011 – a 12 per cent growth from the previous year. More than 2000 electronic government services are available, and 94 per cent of the children have computers.
“In Singapore it is easy to get things done,” adds Kang. “So it has become a test bed for innovative technologies and their applications.”
Government cloud and government total resilience plan are two initiatives that Kang says reflect Singapore’s willingness and ability to be innovative and pioneering.
Kang also explains that the government is recognising the importance of outcome by shifting all its KPIs from output-based to outcome-based. “Improvements of economy and customer satisfaction are really important to us,” he notes. “We make sure all our projects are aligned to these objectives.”
Kang points out that a key to success is ‘collaboration’, with the industry, academia, other countries and more importantly citizens. “If we do not collaborate, we will end up creating a lot of white elephants,” he says. “Co-creation will be a key strategy moving forwards.”
While top ten countries are shaping the world, it has become increasingly difficult for those which fall behind to catch up. Lanvin says a cause for concern uncovered in the study is that despite significant ICT developments across the world, the digital divide between regions and within regions is actually widening. “There are a number of very advanced countries, and many of their less developed counterparts in the region are falling further behind,” he notes. “We had hoped the divide would decrease between 2000 and 2011, but it is still there.”
Despite improvements in overall competitiveness rankings, big emerging economies including China and India still lag behind. Lanvin attributes this to ‘an insufficient skill base’ and ‘institutional weakness’. China is ranked 51st and India 69th.
Lanvin also says a key inhibitor for greater ICT development and impact in countries including Thailand, the Philippines Indonesia and Vietnam has remained education and capacity development.
---
Autor(en)/Author(s): Jianggan Li
Quelle/Source: futureGov, 09.04.2012
Bitte besuchen Sie/Please visit:
