So, roughly seven years after the launch of the first national strategy for the development of ICT, the sector is managing to contribute to the country almost as much as more traditional industries; tourism, for example.
While indeed progress has been made, most of it could be considered "physiological" — it would have happened anyway, sooner or later.
By admission of the same Kurdi, for start, the lion's share of the results — and revenues — has been achieved in communications, and not in information technology per se.
Now, the progressive liberalisation of the telecommunications sector, and all its successive milestones — from the corporisation and privatisation of Jordan Telecom to the establishment of an independent regulator, to the opening up of the mobile sector to competing operators, to the end of all kinds of exclusivity and monopoly — were indeed courageous choices.
But decision makers' merit lies more in the timing — ahead of many other regional players — than in the actual nature of those choices, which would have had to be made anyway, and which would have been made anyway, since liberalisation in this sector is by now universally recognised as a basic necessity.
But if the doubling — and tripling — of mobile penetration was in the natural order of things, the development of specific niche IT products that could identify — "brand" is the in word — Jordan as a regional model was not.
It would be unfair and untrue to say that Jordanian companies are not coming up with groundbreaking products, highly appreciated abroad.
They are, and they are quite aggressively exploiting a few precious niches.
But they are too few, employ too few people, are still quite unknown and voiceless — notwithstanding the good, untiring efforts of int@j, the IT association of Jordan.
At the time of the first IT Forum at the Dead Sea, some dreamed of the sector employing thousands of young people, in call centres among others, and of Jordan becoming a new major hub for outsourcing.
It didn't happen.
Perhaps it was for the best; do we really want all those low-paid, mainly temporary jobs?
Perhaps it was a deliberate political choice; do we want to work on someone else's ideas or be the innovators ourselves?
The fact remains that, after a couple of golden years, Jordan's IT industry seems to be suffering from early fatigue.
The e-government plan is still stuttering, far from delivering on its many promises, and with it is a much-needed sweeping and radical — not cosmetic — reform of the public administration.
PC penetration is still alarmingly low, and public-private sector initiatives to help families purchase computers have been timid and yielded little fruit.
In sum, the sector needs to raise its profile dramatically and gather steam if it wants to keep up with what is happening around us.
Quelle/Source: Middle East North Africa Financial Network, 30.05.2006
