e-Sri Lanka -- a pair of important books!

I attended a meeting to discuss the forthcoming companion volume to Nagy Hanna's From Envisioning to Designing e-Development: The Experience of Sri Lanka. The first book described the planning for the e-Sri Lanka project, which was the first World Bank project to take a holistic approach to support of information and communications technology in a developing nation. The project looks at support for policy, cyberlaw, building a leadership cadre and human resources for ICT innovation, building software and Internet enabled export industries, e-government, and promoting dissemination and utilization of ICT in local communities and NGOs. The comprehensive approach was intended simultaneously to build a policy coalition in support of more rapid ICT innovation, to create a critical mass of innovators and supporters to speed the move of Sri Lanka towards becoming an information society, to enhance the synergies among investments in ICT, and to improve allocation of resources among ICT innovations.

The new book will provide more detail on the e-government and community action programs, and provides information on the evolution of the e-Sri Lanka project. Nagy Hanna was an advocate for information and communications technology in the world Bank for decades and it was his leadership that resulted in the Bank's e-Development program. The e-Sri Lanka project was the pilot effort of the Bank implementing this comprehensive approach. The e-development approach is now being taken to other nations. As Hanna retired from the World Bank he devoted himself to writing these two book which together convey the conceptual approach he has developed, implemented and modified over the years.

ICT and Development

Information and communication technology is (unfortunately) not a magic carpet to social and economic development. ICT innovation can increase productivity in the private and public sectors. It can improve the dissemination of information nationwide, and can help to make public life more open. But capital formation and investment are needed to build the ICT plant and human and social capital for rapid ICT innovation; a stagnant economy can not expect rapid ICT innovation. A closed society ruled by a coercive government is perhaps more likely to utilize ICT for more control over the population rather than greater economic and social freedom; it is likely to censor content and restrict access to assure continuing control.

Sri Lanka is not rich, and in general it takes money to quickly build a national information infrastructure, to quickly re-engineer organizations and institutions to take advantage of the technology, and to quickly restructure society based on a modernized information infrastructure. Sri Lanka's Tamil north and Sinhalese south are deeply divided culturally, and the country has suffered under an insurgency for many years. It is burdened by a bloated government bureaucracy, relatively high levels of military expenditures required by the insurgency. It has a long established democracy and a plethora of political parties who don't get along, and every time the government changes there are deep changes in government leadership. And in December 2005 Sri Lanka was hit by the massive tsunami, illustrating the natural problems that constitute threats to national economic growth as well as to human life.

I note that bloated bureaucracies tend not to be good at innovation. Their bureaucrats are not thrilled by introduction of labor saving technologies, and may not be terribly motivated by objectives of better serving the public. Where there is corruption, there is more likely to be an interest in exploiting ICT for further corruption than to promote transparency and greater citizen control. Rapid bureaucratic change often results in rapid depreciation of human capital investments in government workers.

One would love to see the e-Sri Lanka project prove a major stimulus to social and economic development. It should be realized however, that the World Bank investment represents a very small fraction of the nearly $100 billion GDP, and indeed the whole ICT effort of Sri Lanka is small compared to the overall GDP. Not only must the impact of the e-Sri Lanka project be understood in terms of that larger context, but the impact is likely to be realized over a period measured in decades rather than months.

Morover, any general political, economic or environmental problems occurring in Sri Lanka are likely to be reflected in the implementation of the e- Sri Lanka project, causing it problems and reducing or delaying its positive impacts on soci0-economic development.

Development of ICT

I am not an expert on Sri Lanka, but I helped organize and attended an important international meeting on the use of microcomputers in international development held there by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the Sri Lankan Commission on ICT in 1984. Since that time I have watched from a distance, with a couple of visits to the country. I helped fund the successful Y2K effort done in Sri Lanka, served as a peer reviewer for the World Bank on the e-Sri Lanka project, and had other contacts.

The history of ICT innovation in Sri Lanka appears different to different observers. Those in the trenches, fighting day to day battles to enhance the rate of innovation, diffusion and utilization of the technology can be quite negative. On the other hand, as an outsider, I am impressed by how very far the country has come. The current ICT infrastructure and utilization could not have been imagined by more than a handful of people in Sri Lanka 25 years ago. Cell phones had not been invented then.

Check out the World Bank Sri Lanka ICT At A Glance.

Indeed, I recall that the meeting in November 1984 not only produced two books, but was the venue for the announcement by IBM that it would sell PCs in Sri Lanka. Prior to that time IBM had felt that the national market was not large enough to justify its staffing locally to maintain the product. That meeting also was the site of a demonstration of satellite networking, with a computer in the meeting room hooked up to another in northern Virgina; the demonstration was met with amazement.

There are two information society paradoxes that intrigue me:

• Most ICT projects fail, but the information economy has an unparalleled rate of growth.
• The Solow paradox: "You can see the computer age everywhere these days, except in the productivity statistics"

I think there are a couple of explanations of the first. One is that ICT innovation projects contributes to social capital in ways that are not measured well. Of course, some projects succeed, but even the projects that are judged to fail often leave an somewhat more developed ICT infrastructure, a somewhat reengineered organization to better take advantage of the technology, and a workforce better prepared for future innovation and future utilization of the innovations. A second explanation is that the viral processes of ICT innovation are very important; millions of people buying and using cell phones, buying PCs, linking to the Internet, learning how to use word processors and spreadsheets are all critical to the development of the information society, but are not "projectized" and are not measured in project statistics.

There is general agreement that the investments in ICT do not show up in improved productivity until a critical mass has been achieved. Like the delay in the productivity improvement from electrification a century ago, there was a delay in productivity improvement from computerization, but the United States and other rich countries now clearly show that improvement.

The Computer and Information Technology Council (CINTEC), that was being formed in 1984 is judged to have been influential and successful for some years, but then to have lost momentum. It was replaced at the beginning of the e-Sri Lanka effort by the ICT Agency (ICTA). On the one hand, that history suggests that the process of ICT innovation in Sri Lanka is not without setbacks. However, government bureaucracies rise and fall everywhere, and there seems to be a fairly limited life expectancy for a government bureau.

The team that designed e-Sri Lanka was working in the real world. It sought to find pragmatic solutions to political and bureaucratic problems in creating a project and an institutional mechanism that would work. Not surprisingly, not all of the approaches worked; sometimes there were setbacks. Indeed, members of the team who did a good job in describing the checkered history of prior ICT efforts in Sri Lanka which informed the project design effort were themselves understandably cynical about the growth of the information society in Sri Lanka.

Some years ago I had the opportunity to work with a man who had been a vice president of Xerox during the glory years of the growth of that company. It is hard for people who grew up in a world with ubiquitous copy machines to realize the changes that the xerox machine induced. The company's growth was phenomenal. Yet my friend told me that the hallway and drinking fountain talk in the executive suites was always about how badly managed and ineffective the company was; it was only years later and in retrospect that he recognized that he had been privileged to be part of a truly revolutionary organization that triggered a larger technological revolution.

It is therefore not surprising that from my outsider vantage point, looking at Sri Lankan ICT accomplishments over the decades, I am most impressed by the overall success of the enterprise.

It is hard for the explorers sweating and suffering as they cut their way through the underbrush to fully appreciate the beauty of the jungle forest canopy! Those flying over have a better view.