Information and communications technology in the Caribbean: stocktaking report

Includes bibliography

Information technologies in trade facilitation and their use by msmes

This issue of the Bulletin is based on the material presented at the seminar Information Technology for Development of Small and Medium-sized Exporters in East Asia and Latin America, which was held on 23 and 24 November 2004 at the headquarters of ECLAC in Santiago, Chile. The seminar was part of the project entitled Comparative Study on East Asian and Latin American IT Industry, financed by the thematic fund for information and communication technologies (ICT) for development of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and has been carried out in close collaboration with the Institute of Developing Economies (IDE), an organization that belongs to the Japanese External Trade Organization (JETRO). This article contains a discussion of the concepts, definitions and standards associated with electronic commerce, as well as the opportunities to be seized and the challenges to be met so that MSMEs can expand their electronic business.

Development strategies for the information and communications technology sector in the Caribbean: A global perspective

This occasional paper examines the experiences of three leading global centres of the ICT industry – India, Silicon Valley, and Estonia – to reflect on how the lessons of these models can be applied to the context of countries in the Caribbean region.Several sectors of the technology industry are considered in relation to the suitability for their establishment in the Caribbean. Animation is an area that is showing encouraging signs of development in several countries, and which offers some promise to provide a significant source of employment in the region. However, the global market for animation production is likely to become increasingly competitive, as improved technology has reduced barriers to entry into the industry not only in the Caribbean, but around the world. The region’s animation industry will need to move swiftly up the value chain if it is to avoid the downsides of being caught in an increasingly commoditized market. Mobile applications development has also been widely a heralded industry for the Caribbean. However, the market for consumer-oriented smartphone applications has matured very quickly, and is now a very difficult sector in which to compete. Caribbean mobile developers would be better served to focus on creating applications to suit the needs of regional industries and governments, rather than attempting to gain notice in over-saturated consumer marketplaces such as the iTunes App Store and Google Play. Another sector considered for the Caribbean is “big data” analysis. This area holds significant potential for growth in coming years, but the Caribbean, which is generally considered to be a datapoor region, currently lacks a sufficient base of local customers to form a competitive foundation for such an industry. While a Caribbean big data industry could plausibly be oriented toward outsourcing, that orientation would limit positive externalities from the sector, and benefits from its establishment would largely accrue only to a relatively small number of direct participants in the industry. Instead, development in the big data sector should be twinned with the development of products to build a regional customer base for the industry. The region has pressing needs in areas such as disaster risk reduction, water resource management, and support for agricultural production. Development of big data solutions – and other technology products – to address areas such as these could help to establish niche industries that both support the needs of local populations, and provide viable opportunities for the export of higher-value products and services to regions of the world with similar needs.

Complexity and information technologies: an ethical inquiry into human autonomous action

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)

"Making Sense of Figures": Statistics, Computing and Information Technologies in Agriculture and Biology in Britain, 1920s-1960s

Throughout the twentieth century statistical methods have increasingly become part of experimental research. In particular, statistics has made quantification processes meaningful in the soft sciences, which had traditionally relied on activities such as collecting and describing diversity rather than timing variation. The thesis explores this change in relation to agriculture and biology, focusing on analysis of variance and experimental design, the statistical methods developed by the mathematician and geneticist Ronald Aylmer Fisher during the 1920s. The role that Fisher’s methods acquired as tools of scientific research, side by side with the laboratory equipment and the field practices adopted by research workers, is here investigated bottom-up, beginning with the computing instruments and the information technologies that were the tools of the trade for statisticians. Four case studies show under several perspectives the interaction of statistics, computing and information technologies, giving on the one hand an overview of the main tools – mechanical calculators, statistical tables, punched and index cards, standardised forms, digital computers – adopted in the period, and on the other pointing out how these tools complemented each other and were instrumental for the development and dissemination of analysis of variance and experimental design. The period considered is the half-century from the early 1920s to the late 1960s, the institutions investigated are Rothamsted Experimental Station and the Galton Laboratory, and the statisticians examined are Ronald Fisher and Frank Yates.

The German business and information technologies project

The Business and Information Technologies (BIT) project strives to reveal new insights into how modern IT impacts organizational structures and business practices using empirical methods. Due to its international scope, it allows for inter-country comparison of empirical results. Germany — represented by the European School of Management and Technologies (ESMT) and the Institute of Information Systems at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin — joined the BIT project in 2006. This report presents the result of the first survey conducted in Germany during November–December 2006. The key results are as follows: • The most widely adopted technologies and systems in Germany are websites, wireless hardware and software, groupware/productivity tools, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. The biggest potential for growth exists for collaboration and portal tools, content management systems, business process modelling, and business intelligence applications. A number of technological solutions have not yet been adopted by many organizations but also bear some potential, in particular identity management solutions, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), biometrics, and third-party authentication and verification. • IT security remains on the top of the agenda for most enterprises: budget spending was increasing in the last 3 years. • The workplace and work requirements are changing. IT is used to monitor employees' performance in Germany, but less heavily compared to the United States (Karmarkar and Mangal, 2007).1 The demand for IT skills is increasing at all corporate levels. Executives are asking for more and better structured information and this, in turn, triggers the appearance of new decision-making tools and online technologies on the market. • The internal organization of companies in Germany is underway: organizations are becoming flatter, even though the trend is not as pronounced as in the United States (Karmarkar and Mangal, 2007), and the geographical scope of their operations is increasing. Modern IT plays an important role in enabling this development, e.g. telecommuting, teleconferencing, and other web-based collaboration formats are becoming increasingly popular in the corporate context. • The degree to which outsourcing is being pursued is quite limited with little change expected. IT services, payroll, and market research are the most widely outsourced business functions. This corresponds to the results from other countries. • Up to now, the adoption of e-business technologies has had a rather limited effect on marketing functions. Companies tend to extract synergies from traditional printed media and on-line advertising. • The adoption of e-business has not had a major impact on marketing capabilities and strategy yet. Traditional methods of customer segmentation are still dominating. The corporate identity of most organizations does not change significantly when going online. • Online sales channel are mainly viewed as a complement to the traditional distribution means. • Technology adoption has caused production and organizational costs to decrease. However, the costs of technology acquisition and maintenance as well as consultancy and internal communication costs have increased.

Advances in technologies and techniques for ambient intelligence

Human activity attracting a lot of research activity in several fields including the use of wireless sensors, positioning technologies and techniques, embedded computing, remote sensing and energy management among others. There are a number of applications where the results of those investigations can be applied, including ambient intelligence to support human activity, particularly the elderly and disabled people. Ambient intelligence is a new paradigm for the information and communications technologies where the electronic/digital environment takes care of the people presence and their needs, becoming an active, adaptive and responsive environment.