*Information Society: Road to Tunis and Beyond * By Nagy K. Hanna [1] and Satish Jha [2]
More than 50 heads of state and over 15,000 policy makers, business and civil society leaders have come to Tunisia for a second World Summit on Information Society, known as WSIS. In preparation for two years since the first meeting in Geneva, this is a major gathering dealing with the implications of a fundamental technological revolution that is shaping the global economy and transforming nearly every aspect of our work. Developing countries are anxious not to miss this technological revolution. The stakes are high since it demands substantial investments and learning costs. Developing countries will be investing hundreds of billions of dollars annually on information and communications technologies (ICTs). The outcomes of such growing investments are by no means certain. Rate of failures in applying ICT in both the public and private sectors has generally been high. Developing countries need to prioritize these investments, reduce the learning costs and collapse the time needed to master the new technologies. Will the WSIS address these challenges? Will the aid agencies measure up to these challenges? The complexity and expense of some ICTs and the urgent needs of the poor has led some to doubt the relevance and priority of ICTs for development. Others have hailed the promises of these technologies as the great hope for developing countries. Currently, there is a big communication gap between technology policy specialists who understand the potential benefits of these new technologies, on the one hand, and mainstream development specialists whose awareness and ownership are critical to marshal complementary policy and institutional measures for ICT to enable development. This gap remains remarkably difficult to bridge despite decades of visibly profound changes brought about by ICT in the global marketplace. Perhaps the ongoing technological revolution is so profound and pervasive that it challenges many traditional economic concepts that are rooted in incrementalist thinking. The transformative role of the new technologies may be difficult to capture in national statistics, however, the evidence in terms of economy-wide productivity is most clear in the case of the USA and other developed economies and even more pervasive and persuasive across countries, at the firm and industry levels. The relatively recent and low usage of ICT in developing countries suggest that this revolution has not yet had a significant impact on economy-wide productivity, except among the Asian tigers. In order to have significant impact on growth, a country needs to have a critical mass of ICT investments and users in place. But even in the context of a number of middle income developing countries, studies indicate significant ICT contribution to firm productivity. In Korea, a comprehensive ICT strategy has been a key driver in the miraculous rebound of its economy from the financial crisis; the ICT industry's contribution to GDP growth rose from a mere 4.5% in 1990 to an astounding 50.5% in 2000. But economic history, the cumulative learning and transformation process involved in using ICT, and the pace of this wave of technological change suggest that a "wait and see" attitude would keep many developing countries out of a technological revolution no less profound than the last industrial revolution. Countries that adopt an inactive or reactive posture, rather than an adaptive and proactive one, are likely to lose on windows of opportunities to leap-frog or fail to exploit a structural change to gain or maintain competitive advantage in many of their industries and services. These countries may be simply locked out and marginalized. The Millennium Development Goals of halving global poverty, among others, are also unlikely to be met without the aid and harnessing of these technologies. Promises and opportunities of ICT is not without serious threats and challenges. Their impact is likely to be pervasive. Countries must fashion their own responses. Ad hoc or passive postures are likely to lead to erosion in competitiveness, increased divides and marginalization. Harnessing ICT for development requires a strategic framework that takes advantage of its various roles and helps integrate the options made possible by this technological revolution into the design and implementation of country and sector development strategies. As such, ICT is a vehicle through which new possibilities and modalities of comprehensive development can be realized. Thus, ICT is much less in competition with others for scarce resources and more of a cost-effective tool to enable all sectors to meet human needs better than through traditional means alone. Mastering the use of ICT is likely to become a core competency in delivering public services, education and training, and even micro-credit and poverty reduction programs. To realize this, the current focus on investment in physical infrastructure and hardware and on isolated experimentation and piecemeal implementation must be broadened and scaled-up to address the enabling policies, institutions, infrastructures, and skills. National strategies should be developed to facilitate agile adaptation and participatory social learning. Countries that have pursued an explicit strategy and systematically integrated ICT into their overall vision and strategy for development were able to advance most in realizing its benefits. Enhancing productivity then is essentially a developmental task that requires cumulative learning and selective and orchestrated investments in a combination of technological and social capabilities. Aid agencies must capture these opportunities and challenges by mainstreaming ICT into development thinking and practice. *Technological Change and Opportunities for Development* Development is increasingly viewed as a process of change and learning. Technological and institutional capabilities are at the heart of this process. Technological change is much more than an ingredient in development strategies; it is a conditioning element of their viability. Development challenge becomes one of learning to benefit from such changing opportunities. A new technological revolution would constitute major discontinuities and shifts in the direction of change, providing new opportunities for learning and catching up. Each technological revolution provides general-purpose, pervasive technologies and new organizational practices for a leap in productivity and this combined best practice is referred to as a techno-economic paradigm. This was the case with the deployment of the mass production paradigm in the 20 th century, and currently, the early phases of the ICT and flexible production paradigm A techno-economic paradigm articulates the technical and organizational model for harnessing the potential and rejuvenates the whole productive structure. The transition to the new practices is not easy and may take decades. It is best described by Schumpeter as a process of "creative destruction". With few exceptions, developing countries have hardly started to move on this learning and transformation curve. Newcomers can direct their efforts towards learning the new practices. They may also find a route to leaping forward and catching up. The East Asian tigers took this leap forward with comprehensive strategies to leverage ICT for overall growth and national competitiveness. This involved intense learning, substantial investments in human capital and active absorption of technology. Approaching development under the current ICT paradigm will require similar proactive efforts. Capacity to handle information, knowledge and innovation will be more central than ever. This paradigm also calls for radical transformation in education and training systems, science and technology policies, and even in conceiving development strategies The world is in the midst of a technological revolution with many promises. The revolution has taken many names. It is a general purpose technological revolution like steam power, electricity and the railroads. But the fall in the relative prices of ICT goods has been very sharp and the benefits seem to be coming much faster than those of past revolutions; and the production of goods embodying the new technology is much more globalized. It is a productivity revolution, impacting new ICT industries, ICT-using industries and services, and overall productivity. It is a knowledge revolution that is giving rise to an information society or knowledge economy, whereby knowledge creation, codification, diffusion and effective use are driving growth and competitiveness, and whereby lack of access to connectivity and knowledge tools is giving rise to knowledge divides and social exclusion. It is learning revolution that will transform how we educate, learn and access knowledge. It is giving rise to innovation-driven economies, whereby national innovation systems and regional innovation clusters spark, speed and sustain growth. The transition from resource-based growth to innovation-based development requires a government role in fostering a high rate of innovation. While the promises are substantial, realizing them is by no means automatic or guaranteed. Many populations can be left out of the emerging global network. Developing countries can invest substantial sums in ICT with spectacular failures. Investments may not strategically fit with their overall development strategies. And the learning costs can be enormous. India is an interesting case in point. It has become known as the "software factory of the world" and yet has been woefully behind in utilizing any of these strengths to streamline the process of governance or improving productivity in non-ICT sectors in its domestic industry or services. Some of it may have to do with the fact that when it comes to addressing domestic ICT issues, India faces a different learning curve relative to when servicing the global market. The ICT and knowledge revolution present many challenges and opportunities for aid agencies. Many view ICT as a threat to established sectors and ways of doing business that reflects in subtle but pervasive resistance to the required changes to mainstream ICT into development. Aid agencies should view this fundamental technological change as an opportunity for developing countries to address old age development problems and innovate new means to achieve basic development goals in the context of new global realities. This change also presents opportunities to leapfrog and participate in dynamic and fast growing industries and services. Many aid agencies have begun to address the challenges arising from the ICT revolution for the way they do business and for building client capacity to exploit the potential of ICT for development. Initiatives by leading bilateral and multilateral aid agencies have multiplied. They have raised awareness about the relevance of ICT for development and poverty reduction. They produced many studies, pilots and interesting experiments. But they have not made a major impact on development assistance and mainstream practices. The challenge posed to such initiatives is to focus on areas where there is effective demand for practical knowledge, on seeking lessons and capturing best practices from the ever growing number of pilots and studies, and on building links to practitioners to ensure that knowledge created and captured are used in current and future development advice and investments In the face of accelerated technological change, aid agencies may not have paced up for several reasons. International financing institutions assumed that opening up the ICT sector to private investment would allow poor countries to leapfrog into the information age with little help from the public sector or public-private partnerships. The growing number of donor-funded initiatives and conferences in the sector may have created the illusion of action. The WSIS may end up adding to such conferences without concrete programs to build local leadership and capacity to harness the ongoing revolution for their own development priorities. While some may celebrate the "The World is Flat", as Freedman does in his recent best selling book, the world may become increasingly unequal. Aid agencies lack a strategy to address issues concerning the integration of ICT into development strategies. ICT applications in development programs are growing in coverage, complexity and pervasiveness, but these remain on the whole as add-on components, with little integration, quality control or systematic evaluation. Pilots are seldom evaluated, made sustainable or scaled up and mainstreamed. So far, aid agencies still face a challenge to create a broader and strategic view of the sector, to encompass ICT applications across sectors, to integrate e-development more holistically into sector and country assistance strategies and to link e-strategies to the Millennium Development Goals. Information technology has yet to be mainstreamed into the core business of aid: at the country, sector and project levels. A key issue facing such integration is whether to build a critical mass of core competencies in ICT application across sectors in a central location, or in each sector. A related issue is whether to develop hybrid experts who would have substantive knowledge of both a specific sector and of the potential of generic applications of ICT. Aid agencies may develop new modalities for ICT experts to work with substantive sector experts in key fields like education, governance, public sector reform, and private sector development. Similar issues of integration arise at the country and regional levels, where ICT may provide a new lens for re-thinking development options and country assistance strategies. As this technological revolution cuts across all sectors, is has no natural "home" within the traditional sectoral structure of aid organizations. Often, this new field has become embedded in groups focused on technology or single elements of this cross-cutting sector, posing barriers to inheriting its natural leadership. With some exceptions such as the recently World Bank-financed e-Sri Lanka, bottom up innovations have not led to upgrading common practices. Aid agencies could help governments set appropriate public policies and programs for using ICT to reform the public sector, to reach out to the poor, and to act as catalysts for ICT diffusion among small enterprises and throughout the economy. They could take a strategic and holistic view of ICT, beyond ad-hoc assistance to ICT applications in isolated sectors. Accordingly, aid agencies could scan the global environment, work with governments to develop responses and alert policy makers to the opportunities of mainstreaming ICT in the fight against poverty. Aid agencies could also bring awareness to the pitfalls of viewing ICT as a magic bullet, in isolation of complementary investments in human resources and institutional reforms, and of adopting rigid e-strategies not adapted to local realities. Doing so will engage aid agencies in partnerships with public and private sectors to mobilize global and local resources to facilitate local innovation and learning. *Call for Action * A coherent international effort can help developing countries move up the learning curve and leverage ICT for economic growth. This effort can also harness ICT to contribute to transparency, governance, democracy, anti-corruption, and capacity building. It can help them improve the business environment and reduce transaction costs throughout the economy. It is also due time for aid agencies to integrate this technological revolution into their core businesses, develop the core competencies, and build the external partnerships necessary to help their clients meet the challenges and dilemmas arising from the ongoing revolution. This is a major area where global knowledge and best practices are evolving rapidly, and the risks of slow learning and ad-hoc response are quite high to both developing countries and aid agencies. The forthcoming World Summit on Information Society (WSIS) should provide an opportunity for political commitment to concerted action. ------------------------------ [1] Nagy Hanna is an international ICT for Development expert and has worked for The World Bank for over 30 years, most recently as a Senior Adviser on e-Governance. [2] Satish Jha is a Washington DC based information management executive and has worked as a CIO, Managing Partner and is Special Adviser to the Kofi Annan Centre for Excellence in ICTs. -- Satish Jha Special Adviser, Kofi Annan Centre for Excellence in ICTs Co-Chair, Economic Opportunities Commission, WITFOR Management Consultant - Technology Strategy, Management and Program/Project Management http://www.dpindia.org http://www.aiti-kace.com.gh http://www.witfor.org ------------ ***GKD is solely supported by EDC, a Non-Profit Organization*** To post a message, send it to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. 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