IT Ain’t Playing Catch-up

This IT catch-up game is a common pitfall of developing countries trying to enter the so-called Digital Age.

The Status quo

Governments of the developing countries are spending a lot of money building up the so-called IT infrastructure. They spend millions if not billions just to equip the government agencies with PCs, servers, networking devices and telecommunication networks. The next phase is to spend on software infrastructure tools such as application servers, web servers, portal servers, enterprise integration framework etc. At the end of the day, after depleting all the budgets, there is still no application running on the infrastructure.

All of these come about because these governments accept the advice from the US consulting firms. Having gone through the entire evolution cycles of IT, knowing the lessons learnt, these consulting firms provide the governments of the developing countries with plans that the US has gone through in the past 50 years, believing it will equally benefit them. This started a typical IT catch-up game.

The high cost that US pay during the start of the evolution of IT industry should not be repeated elsewhere in the world. Developing countries cannot afford wastage. The idea of building the infrastructure before thinking about how to use it is a cold war legacy.

What should be done?

The essence of Digital Age is there will be less human-based information exchange. The information is open and ready to be accessed by selected group of people anytime anywhere. Anybody can join the group upon meeting certain basic requirements. It is advancement from the age where information is exclusive to selected group of people because of all types of constraints.

One of the basic requirements is a PC with an Internet connection. This basic requirement is no longer an issue with the introduction of sub-$500 or even sub-$100 PC and heavily subsidized internet connection. The other requirement is to provide every citizen of the country with an identity passport account along with a unique email address that replaces the physical location based home address. The email is the Digital Age Identity Card Number or Social Security Number. It is law binding. This is all you need to get a start. The target of this stage is a stable telecommunication network and the infrastructure related to the identity service provided by the government. The next stage of the plan is to start providing a government payment gateway and roll out e-Services. The target of this stage is the infrastructure related to the e-Services that can be hosted in a national level data centre. This should be the end of the tangible items expenditure.

The third stage involves spending on the intangible items. For example, to encourage the use of the Internet based e-Services, the government can pay incentives to citizens that use the online service. In addition, the government can also make some of the services available online only e.g. getting queue ticket for the application of business license. With enough innovations on how to encourage the use of e-Services, the government can slowly educate its citizens to move forward to the Digital Age.