Businesses and governments fail to make full use of technology

Barcelona: Businesses and governments must make better use of their communications and computing infrastructure if they are to benefit from the full econ-omic and social aspects of information and communications technology (ICT), according to a study by Professor Leonard Waverman of the London Business School and consulting firm LECG.

The study came up with a "connectivity scorecard" to analyse not only a nation's ICT infrastructure but the effectiveness of its use.

According to the study, even the world's best connected countries are not exploiting communications technologies to their fullest potential and in many cases policy and regulatory activity designed to promote connectivity is not having the impact intended.

The scorecard ranked the United States first in a group of 16 innovation-driven economies (as defined by the World Econ-omic Forum), although its score was only 6.97 out of a possible 10.

Scorecard

South Korea, typically a high scorer on other indices, was ranked 10th on the list, with a rating of just 4.78. The connectivity scorecard measured the extent to which governments, businesses and consumers make use of connectivity technologies - the copper wires, fibre-optic lines, mobile phones and PCs that underpin the information economy - to enhance social and economic prosperity.

For each component of the scorecard, countries were benchmarked against the best in class in their tier; thus if a country was best in all dimensions, it would score a maximum of 10. Countries typically considered to be highly connected achieved only modest scores - the average score for a group of 16 countries that included the US, Sweden and South Korea was 5.05.

The results showed that countries can add hundreds of billions of dollars in economic benefit by rethinking how they measure and enable connectivity, according to the study authors.