Oman’s eGovernment strategy, which aims to provide more efficient services to citizens through information and communications technology (ICT), as well as to create a digital society, is garnering positive marks in transforming the Sultanate’s economy into one that is more globally competitive and knowledge based.
On August 17, Irene Mia, the senior economist and director at the Global Competitiveness Network of the World Economic Forum, outlined for OBG Oman’s ICT regional and global competitiveness.
“The ability to fully leverage ICT has proven to be a key element in the development and competitiveness strategies of many countries all over the world,” she said. “Focusing on ICT usage and diffusion, together with education and innovation at large, is a means for developing or middle-income economies to leapfrog to higher development stages and ease the structural transformation of their economies and societies.”
Indeed, since the establishment in 2006 of the Information Technology Authority (ITA), to spurwhich was intended to spur growth in the Sultanate’s ICT sector by facilitating infrastructure upgrades, increasing internet penetration rates and encouraging digital business innovation, Oman has seen steady improvement witnessed an upward trend in its rank on the Network Readiness Index (NRI), featured in the World Economic Forum’s Global Information Technology Report.
The NRI measures the extent to which countries leverage ICT advances for increased development and competitiveness by looking at the environment for ICT and at the readiness and usage of ICT by the three main national stakeholders: individuals, businesses and governments.
Oman ranked a respectable 50th in the 2008-09 edition of the NRI, up from 53rd in the previous edition, overtaking Kuwait (57th) and now clustering with economies as diverse as China (46th), Thailand (47th) and South Africa (52nd).
The latest NRI computation covered 134 economies from both the developed and developing world and accounted for more than 98% of the world’s GDP.
According to Mia, Oman’s greatest strength is in its preparedness to use ICT.
“The coherent government’s vision on the importance of ICT for overall competitiveness and ICT usage as a way to improve services to citizens, coupled with an effort to make the overall environment friendly to ICT use and diffusion, bode well for Oman to become increasingly networked and for ICT to become an engine of growth and modernisation,” she said.
While the ICT sector has made great progress over the past few years, a number of weaknesses will need to be addressed for the country to further advance in the rankings. Challenges in the immediate future include increasing internet penetration, which is currently a modest 3%, and ensuring that ICT training programmes are in line, quality-wise, with international standards.
In this regard, the ITA is making big strides, offering new and varied training programmes for Omani citizens.
“New technology is useless if nobody is using it,” Salim Sultan Al Ruzaiqi, the CEO of the ITA, told OBG. “Consequently, we are focused on teaching people how to use the internet, for starters. One of our most successful programmes in this area has been a traveling roadshow that offers separate half-day ICT courses for men and women in various different areas,” he explained.
According to Nabeel Jawad Sultan, the director of Jawad Sultan Enterprises, an Omani conglomerate that owns an e-solutions firm, the price of getting on the internet will need to drop before internet penetration rates see an increase.
“It costs customers between $70 and $100 per month to have a high-speed connection,” he told OBG. “This is just too expensive for the average Omani family.”
Mohammed Al Maskari, the director-general of Knowledge Oasis Muscat, a technology park on the outskirts of Muscat, agreed. “In order to encourage more locals to go online, accessibility will need to increase and more local content will need to be produced,” he told OBG. “What will bring Omanis in droves to the internet is local content. Right now it is almost non-existent. We need young Omani entrepreneurs to take the initiative and to produce such content. They have bright ideas; we just need to mentor them and guide them and show them how to deliver their content.”
Mia said, “Provided Oman improves on these weaknesses, there is no reason why the country cannot progress to higher stages of networked readiness and make its society and economy benefit from the extraordinary power of ICT as an enabler of competitiveness and modernisation.”
Filed under: Articles , ICT, Information Technology Authority, ITA, Knowledge Oasis Muscat, Oman, Oxford Business Group, World Economic Forum
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