The Connectivity Scorecard is an interesting piece of research, looking not just at levels of connectivity in major economies, but also at how “usefully connected” economies are.
Useful connectivity is “connectivity that contributes to economic growth, especially through improvements to productivity”. So an economy like South Korea has of course excellent consumer access to the Internet via broadband and 3G services – but from a business perspective, use of IT is relatively low.
The UK ranks highly amongst ‘innovation driven economies’, coming in at sixth, behind the US, the Nordic countries and the Netherlands. But – as the chart below shows – that high performance is largely driven by excellent uptake of IT services within the business sector. When it comes to government and consumer infrastructure and skills, the UK is well off the pace.
Poor performance across these two areas are related. The ‘digital divide’ is a reality in the UK, meaning that it is impossible to switch central and local government services fully over to digital without excluding a significant chunk of the population.
Surely this is a solvable problem. Rather than closing down libraries and post offices, these could be being transformed into digital hubs for a local community. I would turf council workers out from their offices and locate them in these local hubs, where they can help people navigate the wide range of digital services currently available.
The UK was one of the first economies to switch from manufacturing to being information based. It would be nothing short of a scandal if government assistance pours into old and declining manufacturing industries rather than into bringing consumer and government IT connectivity up to the level of UK business.
