All talk and little action

I was shocked to read recently that the UK government currently ranks 38th in terms of how highly it rates the role of ICT in improving the country’s overall competitiveness in the annual World Economic Forum’s Global IT Report.

This places us way behind our competitive American cousins (22nd), and even further behind Tunisia (17th) and Estonia (19th).

I didn’t for a second think we would be breaking the top ten, but I thought perhaps we might feature in the top thirty. This is where most of the other developed nations appear.

This isn’t to say that the Tories or, I suppose, the coalition aren’t making the right noises. For months now, we have listened to David Cameron and Jeremy Hunt harp on about the importance of IT and broadband in the UK.

But the evidence suggests that even countries such as Tunisia that have experienced a major political uprising in the past 12 months are outperforming us.

This is an important issue. In days gone by, it might have been acceptable to fall short in terms of placing importance on IT. In 2011, however, it is incredibly risky.

Most countries today recognise that if you want to drive innovation, growth and efficiency going forwards, you need to support and implement an ultra-smart, ultra-connected IT strategy.

So what is the problem? Why do we continue to fall behind our peers?

To be fair, a lot of our strategies do sound brilliant: smaller more agile IT projects in government, plans for the best broadband infrastructure in Europe, a 4G spectrum auction that will see mobile devices enabled with great speed and efficiency, and a bigger push to get more government bodies and businesses in the cloud.

But from what I can tell, these plans are either two years too late or are not being executed effectively.

For instance, our broadband plans to get a minimum speed of 2Mbit/s were delayed by three years to 2015 when the new government arrived; the 4G spectrum auction is only set to take place in the first quarter of 2012 (when both the US and Germany have already had theirs); and despite constantly having the cloud rammed down our throats, the government seems to have conveniently stopped referring to its own ‘G-Cloud’ in the recently published ICT strategy.

Doesn’t sound very promising, does it?

This isn’t to say that we are getting worse – thankfully. Last year we ranked in 41st place, so at least we can all feel secure in the knowledge that we jumped up a whole three places.