Today I spoke at the Future Gov, Sri Lanka conference. After a long time, I had a technical glitch (I raely do, because I work with simple slides and I go early and test; I did all that but the test was not done on the conference machine, fully. Not for the lack of asking). Anyway, here are the slides and the video that was not shown. I made a case for governments freeing up basic data on a non-discriminatory basis.
Since 2004, India has been behind Pakistan on a key indicator: mobile SIMs/100. Few in India wanted to talk about this. But we did. Now finally, India has pulled ahead, as it should. I discuss the reasons in a recent piece done for Pioneer.
Does this picture remind you of the default Windows XP desktop background? That’s what most of Mongolia looks like. Roughly 40% of the Mongolians live in Ulaanbaartar (UB). The rest are sparsely scattered in thinly populated communities in the vast open terrain. The cultures vary across the desert, meadows, and hills.
LBO.lk has carried a report on the TRE results for Sri Lanka, in relation to comparators. I understand this will also come out on TV on Lanka Business Reports. The telecom survey was conducted in seven countries including Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Philippines, Sri Lanka and Thailand. The survey systematically captures the perception of operators, vendors and public interest groups at top management level.
The Telecom Policy and Regulatory Environment survey results have been carried in the Economic Times in India. India’s regulatory regime has been found to be the best for mobile phone tariffs but the 2G spectrum allocation controversy has pulled it down in a recent perception survey of seven nations conducted by telecom regulation and policy study firm Lirneasia. “In India, the regulator does not regulate most of the prices where as in other countries, we surveyed, there are regulatory interventions,” Payal Malik, senior research fellow of Lirneasia told PTI. India scored 3.9 for mobile phone tariffs on scale of 1 to 5.
Causation is a central concern of science. In closed systems such as those found in Chemistry and Physics, this is generally not too difficult. In open systems such those that we work on (i.e., telecom use) it is a tremendously difficult problem because multiple factors are at work at the same time and interacting with each other and with the phenomenon we’re trying to establish the cause for.
The discussion has drawn the attention of some big guns on LBO. Here are the base data given me by ICTA that I used for the calculations. Table 1: IT/BPO Workforce Total BPO IT IT Industry Non-IT Ind/Govt 2010 63,000 13,000 50,000 27,000 23,000 2016 120,000 43,000 77,000 42,000 35,000 Increase 57,000 30,000 27,000 15,000 12,000 Table 2: Average Requirement Per Year IT Professional 5,400 4,500 BPO Professional 6,000 Financial and Accounting 3,500 Legal Services 1,000 Other 1,500
LIRNEasia CEO, Rohan Samarajiva, is invited to speak at the FutureGov forum Sri Lanka 2011 which will be held in Colombo, Sri Lanka from 19-20 July, 2011. This forum will cover the strategies on how to align technology investments with agency priorities – to create necessary infrastructure and establish the enabling environment for the implementation of e-government services, thus, creating an effective and efficient e-Governance. Rohan will speak at the session “Digital inclusion”. The talk will discuss the projects that effectively and sustainably bridged the digital divide. He will also take part as a panelist in “Mobile as a main Channel of Government Service Delivery”.
According the LIRNEasia’s 2011 Telecom Regulatory Environment (TRE) survey, stakeholders in India, Pakistan and Indonesia have identified the telecom regulatory environments in their countries as improved since 2008, the last time the survey was carried out. In contrast, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, the Philippines have seen the regulatory environments decline in effectiveness, while Thailandremains more-or-less the same. The TRE Survey asks senior level stakeholders to evaluate the effectiveness of the telecom regulatory environment in the fixed, mobile and broadband subsectors along a Lickert scale of 1 to 5 (1 being highly ineffective and 5 being highly effective, with the mid-point of 3 being considered average performance). Seven different dimensions of regulation (market entry, tariff regulation, interconnection, universal service, anti-competitive-practices, quality of service) are evaluated by the stakeholders. This year, 349 responded participated in the 7 countries.
Part of an ongoing discussion at LIRNEasia is the tipping point from the operator-centric world of feature phones (intelligence in the center) to the operating-system-centric world of smartphones (intelligence at the edges). In the developed economies, lots of people assume the tipping point has been crossed. But the operators have not seen their “obituaries,” and seem to be working on immortality pills, in the shape of Blackberries: While the carriers do not openly talk about the threat of Apple and Google, analysts say the two companies have fostered a system that could make carriers slow-growing utilities selling little more than generic network access. The revenue from apps, which provide entertainment, news and other services, do not flow to the carriers. In an apparent bid to exploit those concerns, RIM has repeatedly told carriers that, unlike Apple, it believes that they deserve a portion of revenues from its apps store and as well as future services.
IDRC has been in the business of applying knowledge to development for forty years. Much better than straight Dollars or Renminibi. But then, that could be a self-serving statement, given we are in research and IDRC is our principal funder. Anyway, Chanuka Wattegama has written about all this in the Daily Mirror, and included references to two of our projects: The aim of the Last-Mile Hazard Warning System, an IDRC supported joint research project of Sarvodaya and LIRNEasia immediately after the 2004 tsunami, was to deploy various alert and notification wireless technologies intended to reduce the vulnerability of local communities to natural and manmade hazards in Sri Lanka. Adopting an ‘all-hazards, all-media’ approach, designed around a set of five wireless communication technologies: addressable satellite radios for emergency alerting, remote alarm devices, mobile phones, fixed phones and VSATs this research evaluated the pros and cons of each technology.
This has been the week of IT and ITES (or queries related to them). A local weekly asked me about the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Worldwide Cost of Living survey, where Colombo had come in the lowest 20, but above Indian cities and Dhaka. According to EIU, the survey is for ‘human resources line managers and expatriate executives to compare the cost of living in 140 cities in 93 countries and calculate fair compensation policies for relocating employees.’ Companies can then apply this index to an executive’s spendable income to reach a fair cost of living allowance. The purpose of a cost of living allowance is to reimburse employees for excess living costs resulting from a foreign assignment.
I’ve been invited to discuss a paper on Sri Lanka-India services trade. The paper contained a number of ratios calculated using data from the ITC (International Trade Center) on service imports and exports from Sri Lanka. Sadly some of the tables do not pass the smell test. For example, Sri Lanka is not supposed to have imported ANY computer services from 2004 to 2008. The government’s data of exports of software and BPO services do not match the ITC export data.
This is an estimate from a consumer goods retailer that sells 500 laptops a month. When LIRNEasia’s teleuse@BOP results come out later this month we will be able to see what the numbers are at the bottom of the pyramid. Perhaps this was one of the questions asked in the census? We tried to propose some questions, but they closed early. Albert Tung regional director for South Asia at Asus Technology says it is the third best selling notebook brand in the world.
I co-taught an experimental graduate seminar with one of my colleagues at Ohio State University in the early nineties where we explored what policy could learn from research on how people actually behaved, thought and decided. I taught the first half of the seminar by deconstructing various policy and regulatory debates (dominated by lawyers and economists) to lay bare the fundamental (and unexamined) assumptions regarding human behavior. She taught the second half, talking about how behavioral research could challenge or confirm those assumptions. This then led to multiple funded projects and dissertations that she directed on policy-relevant social science research. It was possibly because of this “priming” (a key concept in contemporary behavioral research) that I was unquestioningly amenable to the suggestion to study how poor people actually used ICTs that came from the research planning sessions we conducted as part of the launch of LIRNEasia in September 2004.
We’re generally in favor of budget business models, but export industries that do not earn enough per employee to pay a decent wage have to be an exception. Here is some analysis I did on the Sri Lanka software export and offshoring BPO industries, based on official figures: The total software earnings of USD 294 million are produced by 27,000 people. That is LKR 99,825 per employee per month. Lower than I expected. On the BPO side, 13,000 people produce USD 98 million.