Stopping the tech slide

Sunday 1st July 2001

A love affair with technology arrests New Zealand's slide in the Information Society rankings

New Zealand produces some weird numbers: more accountants per head than any other country, outrageous numbers of asthma sufferers, the highest number of credit cards per head of population. Now add this curious figure: New Zealand spends more of its GDP on IT (about 3.4%) than any other country.

Never thought we were so tech-savvy? Well, it's numbers like this that have propelled us up two places to 16th on the Information Society Index (ISI), a ranking of countries' ability to disseminate and process information. As is becoming usual in such things (à la OECD surveys and the World Economic Forum ranking), countries like Finland, Sweden, and the US come out on top, thanks to their high mobile technology penetration, strong embrace of e-business and love affair with the internet.

But New Zealand's rise surprised even the local branch of the ISI author, IDC. It expected New Zealand to be overtaken by the likes of Taiwan and Korea. Says IDC's Michael Cranna, "It shows that we can make a lot of progress given the unique mix of our small size and our technologically advanced population."

New Zealand lifted its performance in three broad infrastructure criteria: information (up 40% from 1999, but only a slight increase from 1996); internet (up 225% from 1999); and social (up 11% from 1999). It made its most prominent gains in mobile phone penetration, e-commerce activity and PC ownership.

But don't get too cocky. Australia is well ahead in the ISI's rankings at number eight. And, as Cranna says, New Zealand has simply "stopped the rot". In 1996 we were ninth, but were overtaken by the likes of the UK, Germany and Japan.

The survey contains some odd criteria: civil liberties, TV ownership and telephone line error rates. Cranna says these are all part of an efficient information distribution mechanism. It means that Italy and Spain, while strong growing economies, perform poorly because of their unreliable telco infrastructure. Japan ranks 11th because its PC adoption is so low. The US slipped two places because its social policies do not address the "digital divide", the report says.

Pushing the UK's rapid rise to sixth place was Prime Minister Tony Blair's £1 billion plan to get all government activity online by 2005. It has meant that (by its own account) 40% of all government services are now available across the net. About 70% are expected by the end of 2002. Forrester Research disputes these numbers but what seems to matter more, at least in the rankings, is that governments do anything "e" at all.

"When government starts to get serious about e-government, three things happen. It demonstrates e-business leadership to the rest of the business community. It increases B2B e-commerce, as the government is the single largest purchaser of goods and services in the country. And it will have a dramatic effect on the penetration of internet into small business, which make up 99.5% of all business in New Zealand," says Cranna.

New Zealand's e-government strategy, launched in April this year, hopes to achieve online government services by 2004 (see www.e-government.govt.nz). Whoever thought government could be so important in getting us info-savvy?

Vincent Heeringa
vincent@unlimited.net.nz

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