While Ireland hasn't fallen down the e-readiness ranking compiled by the Economist's business intelligence unit, it hasn't made any progress up the charts either, remaining at 21st position for the second year in a row.
The e-readiness survey measures the quality of a country's ICT infrastructure and the ability of consumers, businesses and governments to use ICT to their advantage. The survey is broken down into six categories: legal environment, connectivity and technology infrastructure, business environment, social and cultural environment, government policy and vision, consumer and business adoption.
The US tops the charts this year -- its first time at the top since 2002. In Europe, Sweden is the leader in e-readiness, in third place overall. Hong Kong has also boosted its standing in the table, after surging from 10th place to fourth in 2007, and improving even further to take second place this time around.
However, it was bad news for Denmark, which fell from first place -- an accolade it has held for four years in a row -- to fifth. Finland didn't fare much better, sliding steadily downwards from fifth in 2004 to 10th in 2007 before settling at 13th in the 2008 table.
"We observed a reshuffle in the top 10 to 15," explained Susanne Dirks from the IBM Institute for Business Value, which worked on certain aspects of the report. "It's quite a tight market and there is lots of competition."
Ireland did manage to improve slightly, boosting its e-readiness score from 7.86 to 8.03 out of 10, above the average of 6.39 among the 70 countries included in the tables. The consistent score means that Ireland managed its digital development over the year. But in less pleasing news, we failed to even come close to the UK's eighth position, although we did manage to finish ahead of France in 22nd place. Overall though, the result is yet another blow for the Government's hopes of promoting Ireland as a digital hub and shifting the economy towards a knowledge-intensive one.
However, Dirks said the ranking had to be kept in perspective. "Two years ago, Ireland was number 16, and dropped down to 21. This year, Ireland has held its position. This is good news -- it's quite hard to hold a position," she told ENN. "There are six categories we look at, and Ireland showed improvement in five of those."
However, she conceded that 21 was not a great position. The two areas that Ireland fell down on were infrastructure and connectivity and government policy -- incidentally, the same areas that we were weak on last year. Broadband, electronic identification and Wi-Fi hotspots are all on the list marked "must do better", although Dirks said that Ireland had made good progress on the broadband issue in recent months.
But she warned that we would have to up our pace if Ireland is to keep up with the other countries in the table. "Running at a normal speed is not enough," she said.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Ciara O'Brien
Quelle/Source: ElectricNews, 09.04.2008
