Despite the beautifully articulated vision statement and strategic goals in our National VISON 2030 Plan, we continue to fall behind in every measure and every metric not so much because we are doing nothing, but because other nations are doing so much more.

Silburn Clarke FRICS President/CEO Spatial Innovision Limited

Singapore has managed to maintain a consistently high rating for most World Economic Forum (WEF) ICT indices and have done well to implement a long term national plan. Closer to home Barbados has oftentimes had the highest ranking in the Caribbean (of the 138 countries regularly analysed) and they too have enacted a long term strategic plan .

Things are moving so much faster. Jamaica is being relegated to the periphery of a virtual global ICT vortex. We have to increase the velocity of our firm-level and national improvements if we wish to move towards the centre of this vortex. The relevant measure is not so much how much we increase/improve our ICT capacities locally in an absolute sense but rather how much we are increasing relative to the other nations of the globe.

We must accelerate our coordinated and sustained efforts in order to have a hope of achieving any kind of relative successes vis-a-vis other nations. The nations of the world are moving at warp speed.Even as there is an on-going regional effort to coordinate strategies on using ICT to create real opportunities for the development of human resource and wealth-creation, we are dismayed by an apparent lack of visibility of policy leadership on these issues; and here we reference the cancelled Regional ICT4D consultation which was to be held at the Jamaica Conference Centre on March 25, 2011.

While we are sensitive to the nuances that operate in an active administration, we are longing to be a part of a policy stance that is ambidextrous in that on one hand it executes current and short-term actions that are necessary while grasping long-term and visionary outlooks, strategies and activities in the other.

The march of technology does not pause and we cannot hope to ride the wave of the future without moving from average paddling to jet speed and keeping a constant eye out on the surf landscape. If we cannot stay on the crest, we will be relegated to the backwash, doomed forever to be tossed with every current that comes our way.

At the Jamaica Computer Society (JCS) we recognize that “concrete“ steps have to be made in the form of actions that will give the results we hope for. To this end we have established the Knowledge Society Foundation (KSF) to facilitate, if not lead, the adoption of strategies to enhance competitiveness and efficiencies that will allow us to thrive and not merely survive in the global knowledge economy; we reference the Knowledge Economy and Competitiveness Conference, concluded yesterday April 16th, held by KSF at the Mona Visitors Lodge and Conference Centre in conjunction with Spatial Innovision, Mona School of Business, Fujitsu, JAMPRO and the PSOJ ; see conference details at www.knowledgesocietyfoundation.com).

We welcome all assistance and offer our support and energies, in trumpeting the call for innovation and leveraging of ICT in wealth-creation. We look forward to the day that someone at the policy leader level will seek to make themselves aware of the interconnected ICT issues and challenges that we face as a country and of the need to equip ourselves fully for a future that may very well blind-side us if we are not sufficiently aggressively pro-active; someone who is cognizant of the milieu and constraints that we face as a nation but willing to work with the state of current resources to operationalize the vision.

We believe that ICT cannot any longer be viewed in isolation as an end to itself, but rather should be fully embraced as an enabler for all other sectors. With this view, we need to capitalize on the central role that ICT plays, however, rather than concentrate on issues of adoption and penetration of the acquired innovation of others, focus is needed on building-out and adopting those applications, efficiencies and innovations created by our indigenous human capital. This needed unleashing of indigenous innovation, we posit, requires superlative policy leadership to motivate and engage the entire population.

Press Release from the Governing Council of the Jamaica Computer Society on the issue of Jamaica’s continued fall in Global ICT Ratings.