ICT infrastructure: it's not what you've got, it's what you do with it

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 30 January 2008 16:10

IT Industry - Market

Nokia Siemens Networks has released the results of a 'breakthrough' study that attempts to examine major nations' ability to make effective use of their IT infrastructure: and it finds even the best performers not exactly crash hot. The report concludes: "Even the world's best connected countries have little room for complacency and much work to do. While a perfect 10 is a possibility if and only if a country topped all of the components, the wide dispersion of scores and the failure of any country to score even 7 out of 10 shows that there is not one country that is uniformly strong on all dimensions of connectivity.

"For example, even the US registers mediocre performance in broadband relative to the existing best performers today. This shows the potential for catch-up that exists even in the 'most usefully connected' nation.

The Connectivity Scorecard ranks the United States first in a group of 16 innovation driven economies [as defined by the World Economic Forum], although its score is only 6.97 out of a possible 10.0. Korea, typically a high scorer on other indexes, is ranked 10th on the list, with a rating of just 4.78. Australia fares reasonably well being ranked seventh in the innovation-driven group with a score of 5.93. The average score in this group of 16 countries was 5.05.

The authors of the study claim that their results "indicate an opportunity for countries to add hundreds of billions of dollars in economic benefit by rethinking how they measure and enable connectivity."

The study, the Connectivity Scorecard ,  is claimed to be the first index to examine quality as well as quantity of information and communications technology (ICT) usage and infrastructure. It was undertaken by Professor Leonard Waverman of the London Business School in conjunction with global economic consulting firm LECG at the behest of Nokia Siemens Networks. It "analyses not only a nation's ICT infrastructure but the effectiveness of its use."