ICTs, E-Government and the Digital Divide: Where is the Connection? Al Akhawayn University Ifrane, MOROCCO 07/13/04 Michael Gurstein, Ph.D. Visiting Professor: School of Management New Jersey Institute of Technology Newark, NJ

ICT’s: Information and Communications Technologies ► What are ICT’s? ► Why do they matter? ► ICT’s as enablers  Economic enablers  Social enablers  Cultural enablers  Organizational enablers ► ICT’s as instruments of transformation  Economic transformation  Organizational transformation  Social transformation  Cultural transformation

Enabling Development with ICTs ► Creating infrastructure for development ► Creating/accessing resources for development  Training and skills development  Accessing capital  Accessing knowledge ► Creating/enabling the process of development ► Creating/enabling the means to promote/manage development ► Remote access ► Distributed networking ► Resourcing the local ► Linking local to global and global to local ► Integrating community based technologies

ICTs and Development ► ICTs and health  Health administration  Local health information  Health services ► Economic Development  International trade  SME development  Tourism management and development  Micro-finance development and management  Facilitating remittances from the Diaspora

ICTs and Development ► ICTs and local resource development  Land registry and management  Animal husbandry and agriculture information  Environment and waste management/information ► Education and Learning  On-line training  Use of information as components of K-12 Ed.  Continuing (adult) education

Enabling (e)Government ► ICT’s and administration—efficiency ► ICT’s and administration—effectiveness ► ICT’s and administration—new services ► Transparency ► Accountability ► Speed ► Networking

Community Innovation and Development ► Why innovation matters ► Innovation is fundamental to development ► Innovation less an individual process than a social and community one ► What are the origins (and outcomes) of innovation?  Social environments--diverse, tolerant, knowledge rich  Social networks  Individual entrepreneurship ► How to create the conditions for innovation  How to create the social platform on which innovation can occur ► Community innovation—process and product innovation at the community level—”well it’s new for around here” ► New social process, new processes of political engagement, new processes of local empowerment with ICTs ► Structuring PPP’s at the local level

But… ► Need infrastructure  Technical infrastructure ► Power supply, telephone access, technical infrastructure and maintenance  Social infrastructure ► Technical literacy, training, appropriate work practices  Organizational/management infrastructure ► redesign of administrative practices ► Renewal of administrative culture ► Most of the developments have been in E-administration:  Accounting  Human resources management  Transaction management

Why Bother… ► ICTs make the flow and management of information exponentially more efficient—any activity will benefit from ICTs to the proportion of its information component ► The long term trend is to replace physical goods with information goods—(why move goods or people around when it is easier and cheaper to move information instead) ► Long term competition between state administrations—those who aren’t networked will be ignored ► The inherent benefit (network effect) of networks and networking ► Without an effective local government effective local economic development is impossible ► Globalization (at all levels) ► “An Information Society” for all

The Digital Divide ► What is the Digital Divide?  The “Divide” between countries  The “Divide” within countries  The “Divide” within communities ► Why does it matter? ► The DD and E-Government  E-Government as lever for local ICTs  Creating infrastructure  Creating skills  Creating expectations/demand/cultural acceptance

And… ► A major limitation is that “people don’t know what they don’t know”— ► The need for an “effective use approach” ► E-Government and Community Informatics

Effective Use ► The elements of effective use:  Infrastructure  Input/output devices  Software and control  Content  Social context  Organization of social context/animation/leadership  Policy/funding context

Community Informatics ► “Enabling Communities with Information and Communications Technologies” ► Concerned with research, practice and policy ► Delivery: Community based technologies, telecentres, community networking ► Problem: Digital Divide, enabling, empowering communities, regional and rural networking ► Local economic development, local e-health, local ICT enabled resource management, local e-participation/e-democracy, community based GIS ► Design of technology & implementation from community perspective (CIS rather than MIS) ► Sustainability of initiatives, local innovation, capacity building ► Effective use approach ► Community innovation ► Communities of place and communities of interest

What Is Happening ► ICT application/implementation is an inherently complex and multiparty process  Technical—infrastructure  Content development  Human skills development  Organizational and managerial ► Miss one of the elements and you have a party that no one comes to ► ICT applications require sufficient resources to handle the various elements of the process generally where most of those resources are already in place in one form or another ► In the LDC context many of those resources need to be provided and the process is expensive and time consuming involving multiple, separate and even competing parties with different cultures, languages, funders ► Policy, programming, piloting processes have been top-down and concerned with quick results rather than sustaining processes and effective uses

Now Where To Go… ► Where not to go is to develop stand alone single application ICT “projects”—these fail and are unsustainable ► Where to go is to build the demand and expectation for effective and efficient service delivery from the users/communities -- enable existing processes/activities (sub-activities) using ICTs to make processes more efficient and effective ► Build the ICT component in as a facilitator/extender to other activities

Because… ► The Real Power of ICTs comes when communities are enabled with Community Based ICTs and where a Community Informatics approach empowers local communities to use those ICTs for…

Michael Gurstein Visiting Professor: School of Management New Jersey Institute of Technology Newark, NJ