Now that President Obama has appointed a CIO, is it time to re-assess the need for a Scotland wide strategy regarding information technology and tap into the £2.8bn uplift in the economy this could bring ?
Like the US, the UK and Scotland were early adopters of information technology, assimilating new developments as they came onto the market. Over the last thirty years, use of information and communication technologies (ICT) has grown like topsy, but with little planning - with the result that we have ended up with a bit of a cats cradle.
So whilst we have an aspiration to be a digitally connected, knowledge based economy, storming up the Arc of Prosperity charts alongside those other genuinely digitally connected, knowledge based economies like Finland, Denmark, and Norway, the reality is that there is no Scotland-wide focus on ICT - and a lack of shared understanding as to its role as a catalyst of productivity improvements, innovation and service delivery.
Emerging economies such as Romania and Egypt have developed formal country-wide ICT strategies, informing national policy from digital interactions with citizens to education, health and business. This provides clarity as to how ICT interacts across a modern economy, enabling school children to access boundless educational resources online, individuals to interact with the workplace, government, friends and family, the health service to ensure seamless delivery of patient services, business to trade efficiently domestically and internationally, and underpinning research and innovation
But this integrated approach is currently missing from Scottish policy development, and as a nation we are therefore losing out on a number of important benefits. All the evidence emphasises that investments in ICT are a major catalyst of productivity improvements, and underpin innovation, and that digital communications and high performance computing enable breakthroughs in world class research. The evidence also highlights that we under exploit our ICT investments, underperforming against economies like the US by about 8 percentage points. Closing that gap would be worth several billion pounds to the Scottish economy. Just the sort of life line we need at the moment !
If the Scottish economy is to come out of the current recession in reasonable shape then Scotland needs to be much more productive, and embrace the opportunities ubiquitous ICT provides – with a more coherent approach to increased technology adoption throughout business, the public sector and the wider community
Current examples where change is needed include
Schools : Whilst the western world talks about projects like one lap top per child (OLPC) in Africa, here in Scotland, many schools are lucky to have one laptop per classroom; scarce funds are being channelled into buying jotters and photocopying school books, and some councils have entered into contracts with their IT suppliers which make connecting up the school population prohibitively expensive – yet the Government is resourcing the development of the ground breaking Glow project, the world's first national intranet for education. So, on the one hand we’re leading the world in the move to online educational resources, but on the other schools are struggling to provide the resources young people need to access these. A more holistic approach would see the spend on jotters transferred to electronic notebooks (with a much longer shelf life) and Glow acting as a Scotland wide web-based resource for learning, underpinning delivery of the new curriculum for excellence.
e-government
There are many examples of highly effective use of ICT within the public sector – such as the introduction of online filing of tax returns - but much more could be done to help generate the efficiency savings needed to free up budgets for front-line service delivery. Much greater emphasis on leveraging ICT investments is needed. Shared services can help reduce duplication, and innovative use of technology to support eg the delivery of leading edge health care services could overcoming the challenges created by distance.
E-commerce - The UK is in an exceptional position regarding online business with online sales (B2B and B2C) increasing by 30% last year alone despite the downturn, and a UK market worth some £160bn per annum. But where is all this business going? Well, mostly south of the border - so we need to get Scottish businesses online to grab a share of this lucrative marketplace.
Productivity
In tough times business more than ever needs to keep “lean and mean”. ICT has a significant part to play in helping reduce costs and improve productivity across the business, from simple steps such as
- conference calls replacing distant meetings, reducing travel costs and time away from the desk,
- online sales demos, and Web2.0 techniques improving the customer experience and increasing customer loyalty, and repeat sales,
to major process improvements, supported by ICT, such as those deployed by the airline industry moving to ticketless check in systems, and supply chain management in the retail industries can make a real difference.
But we need first to build a Scotland wide strategy that enables us to get the best out of our collective investments in ICT – to create a co-ordinated approach that engages everyone.
So how do we take this forward ? All ideas gratefully received .....
The one aspect of having a CIO for Scotland is we would need to create a job spec. Unlike other CIO roles, this is very much about "information, process and data" strategy and not enforcement of products and solutions.
Posted by: traveller | March 31, 2009 at 12:23 PM