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Measuring IT's Impact by Region

Canada, Sweden, Bulgaria, South Korea, Morocco, and Senegal Lead

Which of these things do you like best - motorcycles, race cars, or big ol' jet airliners?

This question is relevant when you're considering new markets or sources, an acquisition or subsidiary office, or an investment. Information about population size and wealth can be accessed in seconds, and there are many absolute measures of size, wealth, and national development.

But none of this basic information provides a relative comparison.

The Usual Suspects
Look at, say, the World Economic Forum's Competitive Index. There they are, the developed countries at the top, the developing ones at the bottom. Here in the Philippines, many people sweat out whether the country will finish 69th or 79th on the list.

Wrong focus. People in the Philippines should be focusing on its regional neighbors, fellow members of the "Big Six" economies among the nations of the Associatino of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) - Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Vietnam.

People in the United States should no doubt strive to lead the world by any measure - but should also see how its immediate neighbor Canada is doing. (It's doing quite well by many measures.)

And when it's time for you to consider the countries and regions of the world, you no doubt take a practical approach doesn't directly compare the apples of Germany with the oranges of Brazil - or a motorcyle with a car or plane.

How Does It Feel?
The research I've been conducting and writing about for the past several months addresses this problem by providing a relative, "pound-for-pound" (or "apples-to-apples") look at the IT expenditures of 80+ nations of the world.

As I wrote yesterday, my work also seeks to find "torque" within societies, on the premise that IT is disruptive and furthermore that a highly aggressive commitment to it may be aggressively disruptive. My Tau Index - being developed with the support of Cloud Computing Journal and Computerworld Philippines - integrates several technological and social dimensions to derive a single, rational measurement.

I embarked on the Tau Index to answer questions I've had about the "look and feel" of places I've visited. People who've had the fortune to travel internationally will tell you that you get an immediate feeling for a country the instant you step off the plane, for better or worse.

The visceral experience of breathing and doing business in any place transcends simple statistics that can lead one to believe that all of the countries of, say, Latin America or Southeast Asia are essentially the same. Certainly when it comes to their IT deployments, they're not; my research is focused on finding those places that are the most dynamic today and therefore have the better chances of improving themselves tomorrow.

Yesterday, I provided a list of the leading nations in my research, by income level. Today, I've provided a brief list of the leading countries by region. For more information on the data and how I derived it, email me or Tweet me up.

Americas
Canada
Honduras
United States
Mexico
Chile

Western Europe
Sweden
UK
Netherlands
Germany
Finland

Central/Eastern Europe
Bulgaria
Ukraine
Lithuania
Romania
Hungary

Asia
South Korea
Vietnam
Hong Kong
Bangladesh
Malaysia

N Africa/Middle East

Morocco
Egypt
Israel
Saudi Arabia
Turkey

Sub-Saharan Africa

Senegal
South Africa
Kenya
Cameroon
Nigeria

Follow me on Twitter

More Stories By Roger Strukhoff

Roger Strukhoff holds a BA from Knox College, Certificate in Technical Communications from UC-Berkeley, and MBA from CSU-Hayward. He won a 2009 "Stevie" American Business Award for producing the best publication in its category. He is a former Publisher at IDG and Guest Lecturer at MIT. He splits most of his time between Silicon Valley and Southeast Asia, but can also be found at www.twitter.com/strukhoff

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