ICTtoTransformColombia

InternationalTrendsinICT
AnInitiativeoftheICTMinistryofColombia
Published in 2014

TableofContents
Introduction 1
Government 9
Education 19
Developing Talent 27
Entrepreneurship 35
Enterprise 45
Health Care 55
National Development 63
Sources 69

ICT TRENDS REPORT 1MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW
ICT Colombia Report
Colombia’s Future: ICT
Today, one underlying technology has transformed nearly every sector of the world’s
economies and governments: information and communications technology, or ICT.
ICT facilitates transparent government activity and citizen participation. ICT improves
access to health care and the quality of health care overall. ICT enables businesses to improve
their logistics, streamline processes, and access new markets. It lies behind improvements in
machinery and robotics. The technology provides the means to enact precision agriculture
for large landholders and supplies market information and access to smaller-scale farmers.
ICT enables students to learn more in their classrooms and to access information from other
classrooms around the globe.
The ICT industry depends on a workforce educated in the tools of its technology and
the necessary business skills, and it is built on meeting the demands of every economic and
government sector that will take advantage of its promises and opportunities.
In May, 2013, McKinsey Quarterly’s “Ten IT-enabled business trends for the decade ahead”
highlighted the industry’s growth: “Consider that the world’s stock of data is now doubling every
20 months; the number of Internet-connected devices has reached 12 billion; and payments by
mobile phone are hurtling toward the $1 trillion mark.”
Colombia’s economy has been growing rapidly, and its government has helped pull
Colombia’s citizens out of poverty. This process has been assisted by dramatically increasing
access to ICT over the past four years. Over the coming years, Colombia will continue to
implement and optimize ICT throughout government and industry, and to educate students and
workers to take advantage of the opportunities presented by this technology-based world.
SOURCE:WORLDBANK2006,INFORMATIONANDCOMMUNICATIONS
FORDEVELOPMENT:GLOBALTRENDSANDPOLICIES
ICT Use and Enterprise Performance in Developing Countries
Enterprises Not Using ICT Using ICT Difference
Sales Growth (%)
Employment Growth (%)
Profitability (%)
Labor Productivity ($)
(value added per worker)
0.4
4.5
4.2
5,288
3.8
5.6
9.3
8,712
+750%
+24%
+113%
+65%

ICT TRENDS REPORTMIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW2
ICT Colombia Report
ICTtoTransformGovernments,Cities,andCitizens
Technology can have a transformative power for governments. Moving government services
online can increase access to them; make systems more transparent and thus improve citizen
confidence and reduce corruption; and provide direct economic benefits. For instance, a rapid
online process to allow entrepreneurs to start new businesses may facilitate the growth of
startups. And while Colombia has been recognized for the country’s advances in e-government,
the potential remains for even greater use of ICT, for example in the judicial system.
In addition to making governments more efficient and effective, the use of online information
can enable citizens to become greater players in democracy, by alerting local governments to
problems in the physical infrastructure (potholes, for instance, or other problems citizens may
see around town). Citizens are also increasingly using open data provided by governments to
build new apps, such as those that map a city or country’s economic trends. These open data
projects can both increase government transparency and enable citizens to push governments to
operate more effectively and efficiently.
Data is also helping local and national governments become smarter. Cities are installing
a variety of technologies to improve the delivery of services and conserve energy. National
and regional governments are using massive amounts of data to create city control centers,
to recover from natural disasters, and to improve regional policing and security. And as more
and more of these functions move online, the protection of the nation’s data—cyber security—
becomes increasingly important.

ICT Colombia Report
ICTforEducation
Technology is making inroads into education today in ways that have the power to captivate
and enlighten a new world of digital learners. Reaching from the youngest children to the most
mature students, ICT is opening new worlds.
The use of technology in the classroom, from early grades up through high school, can bring
a tremendous amount of new information to the student. Computers and Internet access not
only allow students to enter that universe, but offer schools the opportunity to transform the
practice of education, so that students can learn to think creatively and to solve problems in
new ways.
Some teachers are experimenting with changing the methods of pedagogy entirely. The trend
throughout Latin America and the world is to provide every single student with a computer;
programs that do so have shown great successes, along with some challenges. Teachers and
community members need to be actively trained and engaged to use the systems best and most
productively, and every technology program in every school system should have clear goals and
methods to ensure meeting its goals.
In high schools and university-level courses, the rapid rise of massive online open classrooms,
or MOOCs, often taught by the very best minds in a field, holds great potential for Colombia.
The greatest opportunity in MOOCs seems to be in so-called blended classrooms, where
teachers and classes meet physically and then use these online courses for additional instruction.
Colombia could also provide online courses of its own for the Spanish-speaking world, or
translate online courses for use within Colombia.

ICT Colombia Report
DevelopingTalent
The digital economy calls for job readiness and talents across a wide variety of skill sets:
programming and coding, product design, management and leadership. Leaders in all
fields must now understand the digital world and be prepared to meet both local and global
needs. Supplying a skilled workforce that can match the digital economy’s demands is one
of Colombia’s challenges. Colombia is not alone in this respect: around the world, local and
national governments, even those in the United States, are concerned about how to train the
next generation of workers. Advanced training is not important solely for the traditional ICT
businesses; ICTs are also essential in local and national government, in health care, energy, and
transportation, and in many other fields.
Other countries have tried to train their workforces through many different channels. In
some cases, their focus is on the younger generation, offering classes and clubs in high schools to
get students excited about the field, so that students can then meet business needs in their local
community. Online courses and boot camps can impart needed skills, as Codecademy is already
doing in Colombia. Some regions in Mexico, Jalisco for instance, have developed technical
certification and training to ready the workforce quickly, at times using international experts
in the field from companies such as Microsoft and Cisco Systems. (Both offer international
training.) Training in product design, which incorporates a user’s experience and interface with
technology, is another key type of training that can help ensure business success.
Universities, especially computer engineering departments, have a role to play. In many
countries, however, and Colombia is no exception, interest in computer engineering is declining,
and university departments are not closely aligned with industry. Some countries have created
special research centers to bring various industries together with academic centers, and to
attract companies to the areas where they are located. University reform can also help by more
closely aligning universities with the jobs that will be available for their students in the future.

ICT Colombia Report
ICTforEntrepreneurship
Although a thriving entrepreneurial sector is not made up only of ICT-based startups, ICT is
the platform behind nearly all successful entrepreneurial ventures. And as such, developing and
supporting the ICT ecosystem is vital to Colombia as it continues to advance its economy and
create both knowledge and jobs.
There are many examples around the world of programs to accelerate developing
entrepreneurs, some demonstrating more success than others. In Latin America, one of the
most prominent ones thus far is Start-Up Chile: this program has successfully attracted dozens
of entrepreneurs from around the world and has begun to create a network of companies and
venture capital, but has not been around long enough to evaluate its success substantively. At
the least, it has created a buzz around Chile and has served to market Chile’s capabilities and
potential as a home for entrepreneurs.
Many examples from around the world demonstrate how industry or government can help
communities of startups to create new businesses, jobs, and wealth. Almost all new companies
need training and support. Some regions may offer natural benefits that have nothing to do with
either government or industry, such as the appealing mountains around Boulder, Colorado. And
some regions face special challenges; in Latin America, one particular challenge is the lack of
access to capital.
Hubs of entrepreneurs, from the United States to the United Kingdom to Kenya, create a
strong sense of community and attract investments and additional entrepreneurs. As Colombia
develops a growing base of emerging business leaders, linking those leaders and creating that
community may help propel the country into greater success.

ICT Colombia Report
ICTforEnterprise
The role of ICT in enterprise cannot be overestimated: it can expand a business’s markets,
enable more efficient use of financial and employee resources, and facilitate transportation
logistics and the supply chain. But in Colombia, as in many other nations, some businesses
have yet to make optimal use of these transformative technologies, while others, particularly
microenterprises, have not yet even begun to use them in the first place.
In Colombia ICT can and will play a major role in a number of sectors. This section, on
enterprise use of ICT, examines two of them, agriculture and financial services, and concludes
with a brief analysis of cloud computing.
In agriculture, many different technologies are available to assist operations that range from
small-scale farms to major landholdings. For large farms, including those that export their
crops, ICT facilitates precision agriculture that employs data analysis to tell farmers when to
plant, when to fertilize, and when and how to use pesticides. ICT can also allow farmers to make
their supply chains public and transparent for, say, beef; such assurances of quality may allow
farmers to reach a broader public. For small-scale farmers, ICT broadens access to markets and
market information. Farmers can readily submit texts and/or photographs to request assistance
with a variety of crop and animal questions, and can employ smartphone apps to monitor their
farms and their herds.
In financial services, the expanded use of cell phones and the Internet can help bring the
unbanked into the world of banking. Mobile banking and micro-payments to poor consumers
can help this population financially and allow them greater access to opportunities in business,
health, and home services. Expanded opportunities for banks, enterprises, and consumers using
mobile devices and the Internet offer greater ease, efficiency, and market opportunities.
Business owners can gain access to a wider variety of services by using cloud computing.
Instead of maintaining their own IT infrastructure, businesses and entrepreneurs can employ
cloud computing to transcend geographical boundaries and access high-level software at
low cost.

ICT Colombia Report
ICTforHealthCare
The use of ICT in health care offers a great many technological options that can improve
patient care, reduce overall health-care costs, and expand the reach of health-care providers
outward to poor and rural communities.
Telemedicine, by which patient conditions can be monitored at a distance, or patients
can access doctors and nurses via phone or video, provides numerous benefits. Remote
conferencing can reduce the need for patients to travel to doctor’s offices or hospitals, and allows
medical professionals to treat patients far away. New programs—for example a cardiovascular
monitoring program in Beijing, China—are now setting up sensors that can continue
transmitting readings from patients even after they leave their doctors’ direct care.
Electronic health records (EHR) can ease a patient’s transitions between health-care
providers without the need to duplicate and transfer physical records, and can also furnish a
base of data for analysis of treatment successes and failures. EHR implementation and use is
rising around the world; however, there are still challenges to their full implementation, such as
interoperability between systems, security, network connectivity, and the design of the templates
themselves.
The data provided by these records, along with the vast amount of other health-care data
amassed in the process of providing health care, is itself transforming health-care policies and
practices. The analysis of so-called big data can be seen in programs that compile data on health,
illness, and mortality around the world to help advise national (and international) policies.
Big data can be used to help diagnose and treat cancer patients, and trends of illnesses and
emerging epidemics can be tracked online.
The ubiquitous cell phone also has the potential to improve the reach of medical care, as
smartphones today, augmented by any number of small pieces of equipment, can serve to
measure such functions as vision, blood pressure, pulse, lung function, and many others.

ICT Colombia Report
ICTforNationalDevelopment
National policies are crucial for the successful implementation of ICT programs throughout
the government and for guiding successful development of industry as well. Different countries
have taken a variety of approaches and strategies to ICT policy. Each approach carries with it its
own potential benefits and pitfalls.
In his book Innovation and the State: Political choice and strategies for growth in Israel,
Taiwan, and Ireland, Dan Breznitz, professor of political science at the University of Toronto,
lays out the choices that various nations have made. Israel is the only country that has thus far
succeeded at a Silicon Valley-style approach, but this has concentrated the resulting wealth in
the hands of a few people and created a gap in income. Taiwan followed a top-down plan, heavy
on state-funded investment in manufacturing and R&D, and while this has worked for Taiwan,
it would be difficult to copy today. Ireland focused on job creation, banking on educating its
citizens for the ICT workforce and on its membership in the European Union.
The world of ICT is vastly different now than the one that determined the paths of those
three countries. Nations such as Brazil and Chile are now taking approaches that involve a
variety of policies and initiatives, perhaps more in line with Colombia’s plans for the future.
As the World Bank emphasizes in its report ICT for Greater Development Impact, national
governments today need to focus on being active participants in advancing ICT. They need to
develop skills among their citizens and provide strong leadership in order to help their countries
become technologically stronger and more advanced, and thus better able to play an active role
in the industries of the future.

Government
IN THIS SECTION
Overview
Improving Government through
E-Government
E-Government: The Case of Estonia
Accessing Justice
Cities Generate Open Data
Accessing and Using Big Data
Making Cities Smart
Moving the Masses
Cyber Security: Protecting the Data
ICT has been transforming
government throughout developed
and wealthier countries, and Colombia
has much to gain from continuing and
advancing the use of technology in its
government. (E-government usually refers
to the use of information technology
within the government process, while
e-governance means allowing citizens
to participate in democracy online.
E-governance also refers to the policy
and institutional culture needs for
creating effective e-government.) By
2010, global government spending on IT
for e-government was estimated to have
reached $423 billion annually, according
to a report by Transparency International,
and more than 80 percent of businesses
and 40 percent of citizens had interacted
online with the governments of developed
economies. In addition, the majority of
World Bank projects on governance
reform between 2003 and 2010 included
an IT component.
9
STUARTBRADFORD

ICT Colombia Report
leverage citizen participation: encour-
age applications such as revenue watch,
procurement watch and open budget—
and use anti-corruption hotlines, utility
misuses reporting, and participatory bud-
geting.” Kenya is one example of a country
that has tried to take the transparency
dictum to heart. In creating online appli-
cations for starting a business, its dual
goals were to cut the lead time and to cut
out the demands for bribe money.
Kenya first began the transition in
2004. The country aimed to place a variety
of services on line, including applications
for public sector jobs, new business appli-
cations, passport and identity card forms,
school examination results, tax returns,
and corruption reports. It particularly
hoped to facilitate access to services for its
poor and rural citizens. The biggest chal-
lenge to making this effective, however,
has been lack of Internet connectivity
or, where it exists, slow and dragging
connections.
In order to share the costs of moving
government services online, Ghana has
joined in a public-private partnership to
create its electronic tax collection system.
The Ghanaian system—which includes
tax processing, collecting, refunds, and
so on—was created through a partnership
of public and private sector organiza-
tions that will share both the risk and the
revenues from the project. (This imple-
mentation is ongoing.)
A 2012 report by Transparency Inter-
national on e-government (“False dawn,
window dressing, or taking transparency
to the next level?” by Dieter Zinnbauer)
focuses on the issues of transparency
and corruption. According to this report,
there is not yet much empirical evidence
about how effective e-government is in
combating corruption. And while online
activities may increase transparency, it’s
not a panacea: there are “loopholes and
workarounds (tailored tenders, leaking of
inside information, excessive use of single-
vendor exceptions) in countries such as
Romania, Czech Republic, or Bulgaria.”
Websites have been used in richer
countries as well to provide transparency
to the government spending process. In
the US, recovery.gov is a site on which
users can track funds available from the
American Recovery and Reinvestment
39
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80
% of all individuals
Mexico1
Turkey1
Japan4
Italy
Poland
Greece
United States6
Switzerland5
Czech Republic
Korea1
United Kingdom
New Zealand
Portugal
Chile2
Ireland
Hungary
Spain
OECD average
Belgium
Luxembourg
Slovak Republic
Slovenia
Austria
France
Estonia
Germany
Canada1
Netherlands
Finland
Iceland
Sweden
Norway
Denmark
Note: Data from the EU Community Survey covers EU countries plus Iceland, Norway and Turkey. Data in this chart
refer to Internet use in the last 12 months for all countries. Individuals aged 16-74 years, except for Canada (16+), Japan (6+)
and Switzerland (14+). For Canada, the ﬁgure responds to the question “to visit or interact with government websites”.
1) 2010; 2) 2009; 3) 2006; 4) 2005; 5) 2004; 6) 2003.
SOURCES:OECDICTDATABASEANDEUROSTATCOMMUNITYSURVEYONICTUSAGEINHOUSEHOLDSANDBYINDIVIDUALS,
MAY2012.CANADIANINTERNETUSESURVEY,2010FROMSTATISTICSCANADA.
medium-sized businesses greater partici-
pation in the procurement process.
E-government is also a critical tool
for supporting entrepreneurship and
business opportunities. One barrier to
business creation can be the time neces-
sary to create a new business. In Chile,
the push for a stronger start-up culture
led the government to reduce the time
necessary to move through the bureau-
cracy of registering a business down to a
single day. And in Rwanda, it can take as
little as an hour.
Providing online access isn’t enough,
as most reports stress, and this is true
for online business-creation services as
well. In response, New York City created
a series of Easy Start Business Guides
that take entrepreneurs through the steps
necessary to create their businesses. In
Kansas City, Missouri, they’ve created a
web portal called KC BizCare Center that
not only details the applicable regula-
tions and procedures, but provides links
to additional resources such as loan funds
and technical assistance.
The World Bank report states that
ICT can be used to “increase the trans-
parency of government activities and
ImprovingGovernment
throughE-Government
n In the developed world, e-government
programs are widespread and are con-
stantly being streamlined and improved.
According to an IBM report, “The Foun-
dations of Efficiency: Learning to Do
More With Less is the New Normal in
Government,” cloud-based services in
southwest England consolidated procure-
ment, back-office processing, and ser-
vice delivery, and saved local governments
$100 million. Alameda County, California
employed advanced analytics to reduce
improper payments by 15 to 20 percent.
Emerging and middle economies have
focused on IT as a way to streamline pro-
cesses, improve citizen access to services,
and decrease corruption. According to
the World Bank report “ICT for Greater
Development Impact,” a simple web site
in Brazil has led to 95 percent of citizens
filing tax returns and paying their taxes
online. The Republic of Korea imple-
mented an e-procurement system: these
systems can reduce corruption, and in
Korea it led to a cost saving of 20 percent
a year on government-procured prod-
ucts. The system also allows smaller and
ICT for Government
Individuals Using the Internet to Obtain Information from Public
Authorities’ Websites, 2011 (or latest available year)
SOURCE:OECDICTDATABASEANDEUROSTATCOMMUNITYSURVEYONICTUSAGEIN
HOUSEHOLDSANDBYINDIVIDUALS,MAY2012.CANADIANINTERNETUSESURVEY,2010FROM
STATISTICSCANADA.FROMPAGE119OFTHEOECDINTERNETECONOMYOUTLOOK.

ICT Colombia ReportICT for Government
NYC BigApps
Apps for Californians
M.T.A. App Quest
SF Data Challenge
Apps for Baltimore
Apps 4
Climate Action
Apps for Democracy
US federal:
Apps for America
Apps for the Army
Apps for Healthy Kids
Apps for Inclusion
Apps Against Abuse
Apps for the Environment
Apps for Communities
SMART Apps for Health
Apps for Entrepreneurs
Apps for Heroes
Apps4Edmonton
Rio Apps
Apps for Finland
Apps for Denmark
Apps for Norway
Apps for Belgium
Apps4Berlin
Apps for Amsterdam
Apps for North Holland
Apps for Good
Apps for NSW Australia
MashupAustralia
App My State Victoria AU
Apps4Africa
Civic Apps for
Greater Portland
Apps4Ottawa
Apps 4 Metro Chicago
Act (an economic stimulus plan enacted
by the US government in 2009) and how
they are spent on contracts, grants, and
loans.
The World Bank also stresses the
importance of back-end systems—inte-
grating IT throughout government offices
and sectors—and suggests that heavy
software development for such sectors is
no longer an issue, “because many best-
practice applications already exist in the
market.” The report writers continue:
“In the open source market and the
software-as-a-service space, governments
can buy IT services rather than produce
and manage IT services themselves. Gov-
ernments may, however, need to develop
capacity to manage the transition.”
Such capacity will include, for
instance, making sure that the necessary
hardware and software are in place and
passing and implementing laws for elec-
tronic transactions and security.
Simply creating access is not enough,
according to the World Bank. Access must
be facilitated by the design and imple-
mentation of software, access to Internet
services by the general public, and advo-
cacy and education, to make sure that
citizens know how to access and use the
new systems. Decisions must be made
about how the data will be both secured
and accessed.
The World Bank’s own evaluation of
projects from 2003-2010 reports that
“only about half” of the ICT in gover-
nance projects fulfill their goals, and a
2011 study in Harvard Business Review
focusing on massive private investment in
IT programs (“Why your IT project may
be riskier than you think”) highlights how
cost overruns can stretch into many times
the initial planned investment, and cause
time delays to match.
In “E-government and e-governance,”
a chapter of the book Information and
Communication Technology for Devel-
opment, chapter authors James Guida
and Martin Crow also discuss issues that
can derail projects, including competing
interests among stakeholders, coordina-
tion problems among the different sectors
involved, lack of appropriate coordination
between central and local government,
and resistance from local officials.
This chapter also discusses, however,
a significant benefit for users: streamlin-
ing their access to government services
through a “one-stop-shopping” portal.
“This way, citizens would not need to
know what department they are deal-
ing with in order to get the service they
need. This approach is about innovating,
not just automating.” New York City, for
example, developed a new website that
consolidates health and human services
programs, through which users can access
35 city, state, and federal programs.
The chapter “E-government and
e-governance” concludes, “There is no
‘one-size-fits-all model for e-govern-
ment development. Each country needs
to devise its own e-government strategy
and programs, taking into consideration
its political, economic and social priorities
and its financial, human and techno-
logical capacities… The key to effective
e-government implementation is a multi-
pronged approach, based on technology
as well as human development.”
E-Government:
TheCaseofEstonia
n Estonia is often considered a model of
e-government implementation. The Uni-
versity of Massachusetts’s Meelis Kitsing
critically analyzes the Estonian story in a
paper entitled “An Evaluation of E-Gov-
ernment in Estonia,” prepared for a 2010
Internet, Politics and Policy conference.
Kitsing writes that Estonia “does not have
a e-government strategy, nor did it create
a special office or ministry for informa-
tion society, as was the case in Slovenia,
for instance.” There was little creation of
specific IT governance laws. Rather, the
officials focused on implementing elec-
tronic services.
Some key facts led to Estonia’s suc-
cess. First, Estonia already had a strong
community of IT specialists and scien-
tists and a strong culture and tradition of
software development and hacking, along
with government officials familiar with
the IT industry. For decades, Estonia’s
Institute of Cybernetics, under the former
Soviet regime, had focused strongly on
computer programming. As early as 1998,
its various government departments were
linked by secure access to the Internet and
intranet. In addition, Estonia’s relatively
smooth transition to e-government ser-
vices relied on the already strong system
of e-banking in place in the country. By
2002, more than half of Estonia’s citizens
used Internet banking, and government
agencies began to use the banking ID
verification system. Citizens were able to
access government services such as pay-
ing taxes while logged into the banking
system. Now, this system has transitioned
to government-issued electronic ID cards.
But this overarching view of Estonia
hides many of the challenges in its sys-
tem, writes Kitsing. For one, their use of
IT in a number of government depart-
ments is still uneven, and as of 2007 the
SOURCE:SOURCE:FORRESTERRESEARCH,INC.,GOVERNMENTS
EMBRACENEWMODESOFCONSTITUENTENGAGEMENT,APRIL2012
Competitions Use Open Government Data for App Creation

ICT Colombia Report
CitiesGenerate
OpenData
n City governments are enlisting tech-
nology to ask their citizens for help in
directing government priorities and solu-
tions. Bogotá launched such an initia-
tive, called “Hacemos Latir a Bogotá,” in
2011, in advance of the municipal elec-
tion. In this campaign, citizens were asked
to point out problem areas on a map of
Bogotá, to share ideas for solutions, and
to propose actions by the city government.
Though not binding, the public came up
with five major objectives for the mayoral
candidates.
In many cities today, public participa-
tion is meant to help city officials quickly
respond to problems such as potholes or
other infrastructure needs. This has led
to the development of city-specific apps,
such as CitySourced, SeeClickFix, and
Citizens Connect. Via CitySourced, resi-
dents take photos of problems such as
open manholes with smartphones, tag-
ging each with a time-stamp and category.
The city servers then can direct the photo
to the appropriate city official. According
to the company, this electronic measure
can dramatically reduce costs to a city in
processing complaints. CitySourced is
being implemented in a number of cities
in California.
But citizens can be engaged in other
ways as well. City governments are begin-
ning to open data that was previously
difficult to obtain, or even off limits, in
the past. And they are asking members
of the public for help in solving urban
challenges. For instance, in 2011 Dublin
released a number of its previously private
city datasets to the public, including water
flow, energy monitoring, air and water
pollution, noise maps, and parking and
traffic data, using a platform called Dub-
linked. This was part of a partnership with
exchange of official documents was still
limited because different departments
had bought different, and incompatible,
software programs. And for many years
after the implementation of e-govern-
ment services, a number of processes,
such as replacing a driver’s license, still
had to be carried out on paper. The Esto-
nian system, writes Kitsing, has also been
weak on participatory democracy, that is,
on using technology to encourage citizens
to participate in, for instance, suggesting
new laws or changes to existing laws, or
more generally in engaging the public in
government processes. Electronic vot-
ing has also been weak, in part because
“voters do not simply need the access to
the computer, but the use of ID-card is
required as well,” which would require an
individual purchase of an ID-card reader.
Some such readers don’t work well or may
be incompatible with browsers, which
could lead to a decrease in voting.
ICT for Government
In Colombia, a post-conflict
society, the ability of citizens to
access the Justice Department,
and to be provided with a responsive,
transparent system, can be of key
importance. Not only is Colombia’s
current justice system bogged down by
bureaucracy, but the entire judiciary
relies on the use of paper. A
transformation to a computerized
system could lead to more efficient
passage through the justice system and
greater transparency. As the examples
below demonstrate, however, this
transformation needs to be slow and
deliberate so as to avoid the problems
that have plagued other countries.
In “Justice Systems and ICT: What
can be learned from Europe?” Marco
Velicogna writes that ICT “is considered
one of the key elements to significantly
improve the administration of justice.”
He continues, “ICT can be used to
enhance efficiency, access, timeliness,
transparency and accountability, helping
the judiciaries to provide adequate
services.” But when Velicogna wrote in
2007, many such e-justice systems had
failed to reach these goals because of
failures of both hardware and software
to meet their needs. One concern
certainly still relevant today is this:
“Unfortunately, the dissemination of
such technologies, when not followed
by other actions, such as training and
redesign of working practices, has
often resulted in very limited impact on
efficiency.”
In the 2013 article,
“Risk Factors in e-justice
information systems,” by João
Rosa, Cláudio Teixeira, and Joaquim
Sousa Pinto, the authors, reporting on
their own efforts in the Republic of Cabo
Verde (Cape Verde Islands), present a
number of case studies on ICT in the
judiciary. They describe the
comprehensive and effective
development of such a system in
Singapore, whose system shifted from a
mainframe approach to a web-based
one; in the process, Singapore upgraded
its infrastructure as well. According to
Rosa, Teixeira, and Sousa Pinto, it seems
to be working well and effectively.
Brazil’s justice system is
decentralized to its states.
As the ICT infrastructure grew,
challenges arose with interoperability of
the state systems. As a result, Brazil
attempted to create a national virtual
system. This, however, was a disaster, as
André Andrade wrote in his report,
“Organizational structure and ICT
strategies in the Brazilian judiciary
system.” The new system had a steep
learning curve, Brazil lost more than
$50 million, and the system was
abandoned in 2010. Brazil is now in a
transition phase to a web-based national
system; part of implementing it requires
upgrading the telecommunications
network to a higher bandwidth. Like
Singapore, Brazil is implementing a
public key infrastructure (PKI) to
improve the security of the system.
AccessingJustice

ICT Colombia Report
IBM’s Smarter Cities Technology Cen-
ter, based in Dublin. The open data also
includes Dublin’s budget and finances,
and in 2013 the city increased the munic-
ipal budget data available, employing
a more user-friendly online interface
designed by the Silicon Valley company
OpenGov.
And Dublin is just one example of cit-
ies around the world participating in this
new “open data” model of transparent
government. In Chicago, such initiatives
have resulted in apps that, for instance,
track trends in the city’s economy or crime
in Chicago’s 50 wards. The United King-
dom has undertaken a major open data
initiative: The government intends this
open data to make the government more
accountable to its citizens, to improve
services and reduce waste, to encour-
age economic growth, and to engage the
public. In order to do so, in two years the
UK’s Government Digital Service hired
more than 200 employees, including
some with extensive digital experience
and talent, to completely transform its
government-citizen digital interactions.
Today, the UK government’s open data
project is one of the world’s largest sets
of public data. (“Government Digital
Service: the best startup in Europe we
can’t invest in,” November, 2013, The
Guardian.)
In what’s known as “hacktivism,”
cities are now sponsoring contests to
tap into the creativity of local entrepre-
neurs. New York City holds a Big Apps
NYC coding competition—the fourth
was held in 2013—and in 2013 the
winning app received $150,000. The
US National Day of Civic Hacking is
an event that stretches over 24 hours
around the US and its local, state, and
federal governments, attracting inter-
ested and technologically savvy citizens.
Code4America, founded in 2009, has
a number of projects: in one, web devel-
opers, designers, and entrepreneurs are
awarded fellowships in which they are
paired up with cities to design new apps
and open databases, and create events
to encourage citizen participation. Code-
4America also hosts an accelerator for
new “civic startups” and a so-called Bri-
gade that offers a national platform for
technology experts interested in public
governance to work together. Similarly,
Code4Europe matches classes of fellows
with interested cities and organizes open
innovation events.
With some additional hardware,
citizens can be deployed as scientific mon-
itors. For instance, students in Beijing,
a notoriously polluted city, have hooked
sensors onto kites, which citizens can fly
to get up-to-date readings of air quality.
That information can then be centralized
and analyzed. Citizens in Massachusetts
ICT for Government
In Belgium, according to the
“Risk Factors” article, early
attempts at e-justice were
unsuccessful, because of a lack of high-
level planning and incompatible
programs and systems. The most recent
Belgian attempt began in 2000, and
seemed to address all possible technical
and security problems from the
beginning (such as the need to change
the minds of its users, including judges),
but the program was halted in 2007:
“The main argument was that the
development team could not solve the
technical problems inherent to such a
project.” The authors write that the
system might have been better served by
following the Singapore model, where
the government addressed relatively
minor matters with ICT before moving
on to larger-scale criminal and civil
issues. Portugal followed this model as
well—beginning with smaller civil
processes before proceeding to criminal
actions—and this development,
according to the authors, appears to be
proving successful.
The 2012 Transparency International
Report False Dawn by Dieter Zinnbauer
spends a fair amount of time on the issue
of the use of ICT in judiciary systems.
Such systems, encompassing “electronic
docket and case management systems, as
well as the electronic recording of court
proceedings,” have proved important in
deterring some manipulations of court
proceedings—bringing transparency to
the proceedings of assigning judges to
cases, reducing backlogs, and making
entire systems at once more efficient and
more transparent.
In the Czech Republic, as of
July 2012, for instance, all
official correspondence from
courts and other official public
authorities was to be deposited in
“mandatory electronic data depository
boxes.” Zinnbauer also lists electronic
case files that have been rolled out in
Costa Rica, proceedings in Nigeria that
have been electronically recorded, and
an electronic case administration
information system that has been built
in the Philippines. India has a “very
ambitious—and ongoing—initiative to
wire up its more than 15,000 courts.”
New technologies are making these
transitions possible. For instance,
the Silicon Valley company Clearwell
Systems can scan a half million
documents and, from them, determine
the 0.5 percent that are relevant for a
particular trial; this effort, which takes
only days, would in theory take an entire
team of lawyers weeks to accomplish.
(“Ten IT-enabled business trends for the
decade ahead,” McKinsey and Co., May,
2013.)
Transparency International says
that it is not yet documented how
effective these national initiatives are
in combating corruption, but they have
clearly enhanced and eased workflows
and supported the transparency of those
workflows.
In Belgium, according to the
“Risk Factors” article, early
attempts at e-justice were
unsuccessful, because of a lack of high-
level planning and incompatible
programs and systems. The most recent
Belgian attempt began in 2000, and
seemed to address all possible technical
and security problems from the
beginning (such as the need to change
the minds of its users, including judges),
but the program was halted in 2007:
“The main argument was that the
development team could not solve the
technical problems inherent to such a
project.” The authors write that the
system might have been better served by
following the Singapore model, where
the government addressed relatively
minor matters with ICT before moving
on to larger-scale criminal and civil
issues. Portugal followed this model as
well—beginning with smaller civil
processes before proceeding to criminal
actions—and this development,
according to the authors, appears to be
proving successful.
The 2012 Transparency International
Report False Dawn by Dieter Zinnbauer
spends a fair amount of time on the issue
of the use of ICT in judiciary systems.
Such systems, encompassing “electronic
docket and case management systems, as
well as the electronic recording of court
proceedings,” have proved important in
deterring some manipulations of court
proceedings—bringing transparency to
the proceedings of assigning judges to
cases, reducing backlogs, and making
entire systems at once more efficient and
more transparent.
In the Czech Republic, as of
July 2012, for instance, all
official correspondence from
courts and other official public
authorities was to be deposited in
“mandatory electronic data depository
boxes.” Zinnbauer also lists electronic
case files that have been rolled out in
Costa Rica, proceedings in Nigeria that
have been electronically recorded, and
an electronic case administration
information system that has been built
in the Philippines. India has a “very
ambitious—and ongoing—initiative to
wire up its more than 15,000 courts.”
New technologies are making these
transitions possible. For instance,
the Silicon Valley company Clearwell
Systems can scan a half million
documents and, from them, determine
the 0.5 percent that are relevant for a
particular trial; this effort, which takes
only days, would in theory take an entire
team of lawyers weeks to accomplish.
(“Ten IT-enabled business trends for the
decade ahead,” McKinsey and Co., May,
2013.)
Transparency International says
that it is not yet documented how
effective these national initiatives are
in combating corruption, but they have
clearly enhanced and eased workflows
and supported the transparency of those
workflows.

ICT Colombia Report
Education 890–1,180
720–920
520–1,470
340–580
240–510
300-450
210–280
3,220–5,390
Transportation
Consumer products
Electricity
Oil and gas
Health care1
Consumer Finance
Total
Potential Value in Open Data, $ billion
The values here are drawn from examples of
open-data potential and are not a comprehensive
sizing of potential value across the two sectors.
1
Includes US values only.
help the government monitor the water
quality of local rivers.
One of the challenges in this entire
open data movement, writes Andrew
Isaacson, an engineer at the data analyt-
ics company Palantir (“Beyond Alphabet
Soup: Five Guidelines for Data Sharing”),
is that the data need to be presented in a
raw, usable manner, be both machine- and
human-readable, and must use an open
data format. Such systems also need to
be accompanied by privacy measures—
making sure the data does not violate any
citizen’s privacy—and, he believes, by a
control system that allows the operators
to know who is requesting and accessing
the data (in order to, for instance, limit
access to sensitive information).
The World Bank ICT report stresses
that governments will need to adapt the
appropriate legal and regulatory frame-
works, including “open government
directives, freedom of information legis-
lation, information security and privacy,
and in many cases technology infrastruc-
ture (open standards, interoperability
frameworks, information security and
privacy) to make these initiatives sus-
tainable.”
An additional challenge to the open
data movement is the lack of data and case
studies on the effects of such programs.
In January 2013, Google’s foundation
announced a $2.1 million grant to the
Sunlight Foundation, an organization that
focuses on the use of ICT and transpar-
ency in government in the US, to analyze
case studies on the effects of open-data
technology in governance.
AccessingandUsing
BigData
n At times, even if city officials want to
make data public, they don’t themselves
have access to the needed data. To com-
bat poverty, provide needed services, and
increase transparency (and, as a result,
decrease corruption), cities need up-to-
date, real-time, detailed data about their
communities.
In response, city officials are employ-
ing mobile technology to collect the
needed statistics. One such project has
been taking place in Nigeria, a partner-
ship of the government with technical
assistance from the Earth Institute at
Columbia University. The project’s goals:
to develop a timely, complete, and accu-
rate map of services and issues related
to communities, particularly to poor
regions, around the country. The project
is also intended to increase transparency,
and enhance local planning and access
to resources. To accomplish its goals, the
project has equipped hundreds of gov-
ernment workers with smartphones
with GPS. The workers visit sites such as
schools, health facilities, and water access
locations, where they take photos, record
the GPS coordinates, and fill in an online
form about how the site is equipped to
deliver the needed service. By Janu-
ary of 2013, when Columbia published
the report, “Cellular Citizenship,” in the
Harvard International Review, the gov-
ernment had acquired data from more
than 250 thousand locations.
In general, according to the Columbia
University report, most data collection
projects rely on paper, take a great deal
of time, and are out of date by the time
the results are collected and analyzed.
In contrast, this online system can give a
real-time picture of the challenges faced
by the country’s communities, and can
allow participants to hold the government
accountable for results. A photo from the
site can also show clearly whether a prom-
ised government-contracted service was
provided or not. To more fully realize the
promise of these types of approaches, the
Columbia authors write that in the future
public infrastructure items will need to
include QR codes, or IDs that can be
scanned with a smartphone, so that they
can be accurately recognized.
One particular challenge the authors
note is that this system also necessitates
the sharing of data between government
ministries, which can take time to get
approved and can run into political chal-
lenges. They say the solution is to make
all government data open access. As they
conclude, “One of the keys to closing the
poverty gap is to provide planners with
increased access to accurate and up-to-
date data that mobile data collection
systems are making increasingly possible.”
A similar project took place in Tan-
zania, a coordinated effort by the World
Bank and the nonprofit Twaweza. Here
mappers trained local community
members, and even established a com-
munity-mapping curriculum at a local
university. The result was a new open-
source data set with thousands of points
of data on roads, schools, trash dumps,
and other features.
Citizens are also providing real-time
data to help governments deal with cri-
ses. Crowd-sourcing, through sites such as
Ushahidi (created in Kenya in 2008), has
enabled rapid data collection via mobile
phones in crises such as the Haitian earth-
quake and the Kenya riots. There are
limitations to such approaches, however,
says Ari Gesher, an engineer at the data
integration company Palantir. For one
thing, this method relies on locals who
have access to usable phones, which might
not represent the reality of the situation.
SOURCE:MCKINSEYGLOBALINSTITUTEANALYSIS
Open Data can Help Unlock $3 Trillion to $5 Trillion
in Economic Value Annually Seven Sectors
ICT for Government

ICT Colombia Report
During Hurricane Sandy, for instance,
the greatest twitter concentration was in
Manhattan, while there was greater harm
but less social media content in poorer
areas such as Far Rockaway, with fewer
smartphones and Twitter accounts. In
addition, says Gesher, “people might even
be spitting out good information about
what’s going on, but they’re doing it in
a form” that computers can’t recognize,
or in nonstandard forms that prevent
quick integration. Still, as the World Bank
stresses, ICT is a necessary and key part of
effective disaster risk management.
Such analytics are also providing
information for law enforcement. In the
study “Predictive Policing: Preventing
Crime with Data and Analytics” by Jenni-
fer Bachner at Johns Hopkins University
(and sponsored by the IBM Center for
the Business of Government), Bachner
describes ways in which data analytics
and modeling is assisting policing. For
instance, in Santa Cruz, California, police
departments partnered with social sci-
entists to determine the areas with the
greatest likelihood of experiencing crime,
and in Richmond, Virginia, the police
“used social network analysis to cut off
a suspect’s resources and drive the sus-
pect to turn himself into the police.” To
enable such a system, the recommenda-
tions include treating technology as an
addition to policing (not a substitution
for it), making sure that the software is
available to police officials out on their
beats, and ensuring the data are timely
and accurate.
MakingCitiesSmart
n Technology that enables a more effective,
efficient government is also transforming
cities themselves, making cities smarter.
Probably the most advanced example of
a smart city today is Santander, a small
coastal city of 180 thousand on Spain’s
northern Atlantic coast. The pilot project,
headed by Luis Muñoz, an IT professor
at the University of Cantabria, received
$11 million in grants from the European
Union to test the viability of smart cities,
prior to rolling out the initiative elsewhere
in Europe. The result: 12 thousand sensors
on buildings, beneath parking lots, and
attached to street lamps and poles.
The data collected from those sen-
sors—including the temperature and
humidity, the movement of vehicles and
people, the light outdoors—is regularly
transmitted to a central office. Vehicles
such as buses, taxis, and police cars trans-
mit their locations and speed, along with
air pollution data captured from the envi-
ronment outside the vehicle. If residents
choose, they may participate by down-
loading an app for their cell phones.
The information is compiled and
available for use both by city officials and
by citizens. Officials know the locations
of traffic jams and accidents, and where
Managing Disasters with ICT
Palantir is a company with expertise in data integration and
analysis, working on huge, sensitive caches of information for clients
as massive as the CIA and international banks. Now the company is
helping nonprofits and city officials deal with disasters. They are part
of The Rockefeller Foundation’s initiative called 100 Resilient Cities,
announced in September 2013 at the Clinton Global Initiative. Its goal is
to collect weather, demographic, and census data and “fuse that [data]
so the city itself generates its own operations…so that when disaster
strikes they can actually respond more effectively,” according to Palantir
engineer Ari Gesher.
The initiative focuses on cities that could suffer extreme weather events or terrorism. Many recoveries, Gesher
says, are a race against time, determining what needs to be dealt with first to effectively save as many structures
(or, at times, people) as possible. This builds off Palantir’s expertise in situations such as Hurricane Sandy, when
they equipped Team Rubicon, a nonprofit group of veterans who provide disaster relief, with a way to generalize
and centralize the gathering of information from tablets and mobile phones to dispatch the best teams to deal with
the damage. “Palantir hadn’t been configured for this,” says Gesher. “We built it on the spot, and five or six days
later, they were doing disaster relief in a way that nobody had ever done before.”
Probably the most advanced example of a smart city today is Santander,
a small coastal city of 180 thousand on Spain’s northern Atlantic coast.
COURTESYOFTHEUNIVERSITYOFCANTABRIA
ICT for Government

ICT Colombia Report
light bulbs need to be replaced. Garbage
collectors know whether or not to pick
up trash, depending on whether dump-
sters are full. The ubiquitous sensors
have led to automatic systems for dim-
ming lights and watering park plants.
And residents—via a Pulse of the City
app—can access bus information, city
cultural events, and even historical
information about the town. They can
contribute to the betterment of the city
by anonymously sending photos of what-
ever needs to be fixed.
The results thus far have been
positive: within only a month of imple-
mentation, the city saved 25 percent
on electricity costs and 20 percent on
garbage collection.
Many other cities have undertaken
such initiatives as well, though not as
comprehensively as Santander. In Singa-
pore, sensors, cameras, and GPS devices
are used to promote rapid traffic flow.
In Rio de Janeiro, a city control center
receives up-to-date streaming informa-
tion from dozens of city agencies and from
subway stations, traffic lights, and utilities.
And in Estonia, residents who park in a city
lot text the car’s number and the lot’s code
to the parking authority; the parking fees
are then added to their phone bills.
Many major companies are getting into
the business of smart cities, including IBM,
Cisco, Siemens, Microsoft, General Electric,
Hitachi, and Singapore Technologies.
IBM’s Katharine Frase, CTO of IBM
Public Sector (their Smarter Cities effort)
observes that cities are made up of “infra-
structure, water, services, people. How can
data analytics and IT help all of these be
more effective, not just more efficient?” And
the company has turned its attention to
solving that problem. For example, IBM
held a Smarter Cities Challenge Grants
competition and provided expert counsel
to 33 cities around the world in 2012. The
projects include plans in Nairobi, Kenya
to optimize Kenya’s water system and
Nairobi’s traffic; and analyses of data in
Louisville, Kentucky to identify, predict,
and mitigate asthma. In addition, IBM
Research is building a new lab in Kenya
to work on Next-Generation Public Sec-
tor solutions, as they’ve titled the effort, to
enable multiple government agencies to
easily share information (something that
remains a challenge today).
Barcelona has pioneered smart ini-
tiatives such as smart parking and bus
networks, and is working with the inter-
national company Cisco to make the city
a model of smart initiatives to improve
its services, such as monitoring energy
consumption in buildings and develop-
ing more efficient use of water, including
rainwater. As part of the initiative, Cisco is
now establishing the new Barcelona Insti-
tute of Technology for the Habitat, which
will collaborate with private companies
to study innovations in urban solutions.
Cisco is also helping South Korea build a
new city called Songo, a $35 billion dol-
lar project, with a variety of cutting-edge
technologies, including extensive sensors
distributed throughout the city.
Visualizing Government Data
All that data produced in cities
can be overwhelming for citizens
to make use of. But what if it were
easily visualized? That’s the idea
behind César Hidalgo’s Macro
Connections group at the MIT Media
Lab. Hidalgo and his collaborators
created DataViva for the local
government in the Brazilian state
of Minas Gerais. The DataViva site
still provides many options, but
users can visualize the economy of
the past decade as a way to help
the government “sift through some
of the huge amounts of economic
data available from the federal
government,” according to the
December 2013 article on the Fast
Company website, “New MIT Media
Lab Tool Lets Anyone Visualize
Unwieldy Data.” André Barrence,
director of the Minas Gerais office
of strategic priorities, told Fast
Company that the data proved so
useful that “we thought it would be
much more interesting if we could
open up the data for the entire
country rather than just ourselves.”
SOURCE:MITMEDIALAB
ICT for Government

ICT Colombia Report
All the data amassed by city govern-
ments can be put to good use to make those
governments more effective and efficient.
Meeting that goal is the focus of a new
center at New York University, called the
Center for Urban Studies and Progress,
founded by Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The
program, which grants an intensive one-
year masters degree, aims to breed a new
generation of urban scientists, who can dive
into massive data sources and use the infor-
mation to develop solutions to complex and
growing urban problems. NYU sees this as
an opportunity to enable the university—
and New York itself—to become a leader in
this rapidly growing field. This program is
a complement to other leaders in the field,
such as MIT Cities, part of the MIT Media
Lab, whose research themes include urban
analytics and modeling, energy networks,
and incentive and governance.
MovingtheMasses
n Part of what can enhance the ‘smartness’
and livability of cities is increasing the
use of ICT in the transportation sector. IT
companies and city planners have developed
a number of different models for easing
congestion and pollution. For example, the
Spanish traffic authority has invested in
intelligent transportation systems (ITS) in
recent years. Automatic overhead tolling
systems collect money without slowing
the cars down. In one technology in use
in Spain, when GPS systems in buses can
alert a central computer that the bus is
approaching a traffic signal, the system
allows the light to stay green and the bus
to keep moving. In Singapore, sensors,
cameras, and GPS devices send information
to a centralized control system that keeps
traffic flowing, combined with congestion
pricing to reduce automobile traffic. And
in a move other cities with growing elderly
populations may want to adopt, the elderly
or disabled in Singapore can tap special
cards equipped with radio frequency
IDs against traffic light poles, which will
signal the lights to offer a longer and safer
crossing time.
In Rio, IBM has built a complex and
integrated system, a control center with
information regularly pouring in from 30
city agencies, which send data from city
sources including subway stations, traf-
fic lights, and utilities, to allow the city
to manage accidents, power failures, and
emergencies. And in Mumbai, real-time
traffic management has been used at
253 crossings, resulting in a 12 percent
reduction in traffic time and an 85 per-
cent reduction in energy usage from the
traffic lights.
Several companies have also developed
intelligent systems that can help cars avoid
circling in search of parking, which wastes
both time and gas and contributes to a city’s
pollution. Sensors in parking spots alert a
central control system when they are open,
and electronic signs then communicate this
information to drivers. A number of com-
panies have developed such systems
for parking garages and for city streets,
including Streetline in California,
whose sensors line city streets around
the world, and Spain’s ParkHelp. This
type of system enabled the city of San
Francisco to introduce pricing based on
demand—higher prices during times of
greater demand.
This arena can encourage entre-
preneurship and citizen participation.
The Israeli startup Waze, purchased
by Google in June, 2013 for $1 billion,
relies on crowd-sourced traffic infor-
mation from about 30 million drivers
worldwide to provide an up-to-date
picture of road conditions, including
traffic jams, construction, and acci-
dents—all to help drivers save money,
time, and gas. And startups such as
Lyft and Uber match up travelers with
available drivers.
The World Bank has funded a pro-
gram in the Philippines to distribute
GPS-enabled phones to taxis in order
to collect and disseminate traffic data.
This will allow the city to generate real-
time maps about congestion and traffic
volume. At the same time, a text-mes-
sage platform allows citizens to report
on traffic needs to help the city create
better plans and budgets for the future.
Carlo Ratti, director of the SENSE-
able City Lab at MIT’s Media Lab, sees
The new operations center in Rio provides the incident commander and responders with a
single, unified view of all the information that they require for situational awareness.
Waze, purchased by Google in June, 2013
for $1 billion, relies on crowd-sourced
traffic information from about 30 million
drivers worldwide.
SOURCE:COMMUNICATIONS&BRANDEXPERIENCE,IBM
ICT for Government
SOURCE:HTTPS://WWW.WAZE.COM/

ICT Colombia Report
a way to take information about traffic
and advance the discussion. If city offi-
cials have access to, for instance, all the
regularly updated GPS data from all of
a city’s taxis, “How can we use all that
information to promote action?” Ratti
asked in a recent talk at MIT’s Emerg-
ing Technologies (EmTech) conference.
His lab has developed a project called
HubCab that models all the New York
City cab pickups and dropoffs, to show
how much more effective and effi-
cient it could be for one cab, perhaps
a taxi minivan, to transport multiple
people. This would reduce the use of
gasoline, and the model shows that
NYC could meet its taxi needs with 40
percent fewer cabs using such a sys-
tem. Other cab programs like Uber
and Magic Taxi—which compete with
traditional taxi systems—have created
entrepreneurship opportunities, and
can reduce the costs of service through
competition.
CyberSecurity:
ProtectingtheData
n As ICT plays an increasing role in
Colombia, the government, as those
of all countries in the world today, will
navigate the challenges of securing the
data and the systems involved. Security
is a growing concern: according to a
new report by Melissa Hathaway,
cyber security expert, former acting
senior director for cyberspace at the US
National Security Council, and a senior
advisor at Harvard University’s Belfer
Center for Science and International
Affairs, “it is estimated that the Group
of 20 economies have lost 2.5 million
jobs to counterfeiting and piracy, and
that governments and consumers lost
$125 billion annually, including losses
in tax revenue.” (“Cyber Readiness
Index 1.0,” November, 2013).
Hathaway examines 35 countries
“that have embraced ICT and the
Internet” and evaluates them across an
initial five areas. (She adds that deeper
analyses could be accomplished using
a subindex for each area.)
These are the five essential elements,
as outlined in Hathaway’s study:
1. Articulation and publication of a
national cyber security strategy
2. Does the country have an
operational computer emergency
response team or computer security
incident response team?
3. Has the country demonstrated
commitment to protect against cyber
crime?
4. Does the country have an
information-sharing mechanism?
5. Is the country investing in basic
and applied cyber security research and
broadly funding cyber security initiatives?
Colombia is not included in the 35
countries selected for analysis here;
Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico are the
only Latin American countries studied.
According to Hathaway’s analysis, though
some countries including Australia,
Canada, the UK, and the US are ahead
in terms of cyber security preparedness,
“even these countries are experiencing
GDP degradation due to cyber insecurity.”
The paper states: “No country is cyber
ready.” Hathaway expresses the hope that
this index “should spark international
discussions about priorities required to
strengthen security and encourage gov-
ernments to take action and reduce risks.”
Conclusion:
n Governments are taking advantage of
ICT in a variety of ways. In e-govern-
ment, local and national governments are
improving the services they provide for
their citizens and their citizens’ abilities to
access those services easily and transpar-
ently. In open-data initiatives, the govern-
ments are providing data to the citizens,
who can use that information to participate
in democracy more actively, or can design
apps or programs to make more efficient
use of those services.
All the data that cities provide can be
augmented, whether through improved
mapping, or sensors spread around
cities. This increased volume of informa-
tion is helping make cities “smarter,” via
Smart City initiatives around the world
that employ ICT to achieve, for instance,
smoother traffic flow and reduced energy
use. The immense quantity of data col-
lected, known as big data, can allow for
initiatives such as Rio’s control center, bet-
ter disaster management, and improved
police protection. All of these systems are
potentially vulnerable to cyber attack,
however, and cyber security will be an
increasing concern for all governments.
=SOURCE:PONEMONINSTITUTERESEARCHDEPARTMENT
United StatesGermanyJapanFranceUnited KingdomAustralia
$14
$12
$10
$8
$6
$4
$2
$0
$3.67
$4.72
$5.19
$6.73
$7.56
$11.56
Cost expressed in $ millions (USD)
Total Cost of Cyber Crime in Six Countries
This chart represents the estimated average cost of cyber crime for six country samples involving 234
separate companies. These figures are converted into US dollars for comparative purposes. As shown,
there is significant variation in total cyber crime costs among partcipating companies in the benchmark
samples. The US sample reports the highest total average cost at $11.56 million and the Australian
sample reports the lowest total average cost at $3.67 mission.
ICT for Government

Education
IN THIS SECTION
Overview
Laptops for Students
Supporting Teachers and Students
Mobile Learning
Online Learning
n From Kenya to Uruguay to the US,
municipalities, states, and countries have
greatly increased their use of technology
in education. A simultaneous trend is the
growth of distance learning, particularly
as is evident in the rapid development of
massive open online courses, commonly
known as MOOCs. This section will look
at recent trends in and analyses of the
introduction of computers, tablets, and
Internet connectivity in classrooms; the
need for content, and its development;
and the potential impact and challenges
of MOOCs and distance learning.
MOOCS Offerings
SOURCE:NATURE.COM
Number of courses
available on the platform
Number of user accounts
on the platform (millions)
Supply and Demand Student Origins
Courses Offered
3.5
3.0
2.5
2.0
1.5
1.0
1.0
0
350
300
250
200
150
100
50
0
February 2012 March 2012
2.27% United States
8.8% India
6% Mathematics
30% Science
13% Business
28% Arts & humanites23% Information
technology
5.1% Brazil
4.4 United Kingdom
4% Spain
3.6% Canada
2.3% Australia
2.2% Russia
41.9% Rest of world
19STUARTBRADFORD

ICT Colombia Report
provide every town with school- and com-
munity-based Internet connectivity, so
the students have access not just in the
classroom. The goals of the project, which
was initiated by President Tabaré Vázquez
in 2007, were and still are multifaceted:
• To bridge the digital divide by allow-
ing poor and rural students access to
higher technology and educational oppor-
tunities
• To improve educational outcomes
• To provide Internet connectivity
to local homes by allowing residents to
access the school’s Internet connections.
In 2008, the first computers, com-
plete with wireless connections, video
and audio capabilities, and educational
software, were placed in the hands of
elementary school students, and the pro-
gram then focused on secondary school
students as well. Teacher training ses-
sions were delivered to more than twenty
thousand teachers, and more than five
hundred additional support teachers were
hired.
dren learn. If you introduce technology
but continue to do the same things [in the
classroom], there won’t be any improve-
ments in learning.”
Though other countries have handed
out more computers overall, Uruguay
is alone in getting a computer into the
hands of every student in the country—
urban, near-urban, and rural—via Plan
CEIBAL. CEIBAL’s acronym translates
to Educational Connectivity/Basic Com-
puting for Online Learning. (A ceibo is a
flowering Uruguayan tree.) The comput-
ers are rugged laptops, from One Laptop
Per Child, and this program also aims to
LaptopsforStudents
n One model many emerging and middle
economy countries have found promis-
ing is the idea of providing every student
with a laptop or tablet. While the goal
of increasing access to technology and
decreasing the digital divide is a worthy
one, this approach has its critics. There
may be a variety of goals for the projects:
increased digital access and literacy, for
one, and an improvement in academic
achievement. According to experts, evalu-
ations of the efficacy of these programs in
achieving academic advancement do not
show clear results. The general implica-
tions of the examples below appear to be
that technology alone is not sufficient—it
must be coupled with the appropriate
instruction and support for teachers and
others in positions of authority.
Even beyond instruction, says, Clau-
dia Urrea, research scientist at the MIT
Media Lab and expert on technology in
education, “there must be a significant
change in methodology and the way chil-
When we talk about
computers in education, we
should not think about a machine
having an effect. We should be
talking about the opportunity
offered us, by this computer
presence, to rethink what learning
is all about, to rethink education.”
Technocentrism (Papert and E. & L. Group, 1990)
SOURCE:GIULIA@LAPTOP.ORG
ICT for Education

ICT Colombia Report
Within only a few years, Plan CEIBAL
did manage its first overall goal: universal
access. Some of its primary accompanying
goals, however, have yet to be accom-
plished. Based on surveys conducted by
Lucía Pittaluga and Ana Rivoir and pub-
lished in Information Technologies &
International Development in December
2012 (“One Laptop Per Child and Bridg-
ing the Digital Divide: The Case of Plan
CEIBAL in Uruguay”), effective student
use of the computers depends in large part
on the abilities of the adults in their lives,
whether teachers or parents.
Urrea points to particular successes of
Uruguayan students she’s met: “There are
a number of students who have become
fluent programmers, and have contributed
to the number of applications available in
the One Laptop Per Child platform. One
of them, who won the Google Code-in last
year, taught himself English.”
According to the interviews in the
published study, parents of the Plan
CEIBAL children confirmed that their
children accessed educational material
at home, but the adults interviewed did
not see the computers as tools that could
assist them in solving problems of their
own. The survey also found that chil-
dren use the laptops at home primarily
for entertainment, and that their inter-
est in the computers tends to wane over
time. Some of the interview subjects
also pointed out that the computers had
not been well integrated into the school
curricula.
The project was evaluated in Janu-
ary, 2013 by the Canadian expert Michael
Fullan, whose report was cowritten with
Nancy Watson and Stephen Anderson.
Fullan points out that the original scope
of the project focused almost entirely on
access. As such, it was a success: nearly
every student had access, nearly every
teacher knew how to use the technology,
nearly every school had Internet access
(connections are being upgraded to fiber
optics), and the program enjoys a 92 per-
cent public approval rating. In addition,
the computers are being used as a way
to rapidly assess student performance,
which is helping teachers find holes in
their teaching.
Still, there are weaknesses, and chal-
lenges in addressing goals for the future.
For the next phase, the Uruguayan gov-
ernment plans to focus on using the
technology specifically to improve learn-
ing, not just to narrow the digital divide.
Teachers need better guidance on how to
take advantage of the courses and educa-
tional support the project offers. As such,
they have a number of projects in place,
including the following:
• Hiring individuals whose mandate
is to help teachers integrate technology,
working within a school or with a cluster
of schools;
• Development of a new program for
adaptive mathematics (and continuing
with online math and chess tournaments);
and
• Remote English teaching, connect-
ing classrooms to a native English teacher
via video conferencing (contracted with
the British Council) in which one hour
of native-speaker video instruction is
followed by two hours of classroom
instruction.
Fullan finds these programs are com-
mendable but recommends three specific
goals:
• English and Spanish literacy,
• Mathematics, and
• Reducing the number of students
who repeat grades six, seven, and eight.
He suggests improving the ways that
teachers can share their use of technology,
improving the use of the online assess-
ment, and making sure teachers’ funding
Percentageofpeopleperincomedecile
80%
90% 10 Richest
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1 Poorest
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
2004 2006 2008 2009 2010
Incomedistributiondecile
20%% 40% 60%
2009 (December)
2010 (December)
Richest 10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
Poorest 1
Plan CEIBAL: Bridging the Digital Divide in Uruguay
SOURCE:ENCUESTACONTINUADEHOGARES-INESOURCE:ENCUESTACONTINUADEHOGARES-INE
Figure 1: Access to computers in households. Percentage of people in each per
capita income decile (without leasing value, excluding rural locations and towns
with a population of less than 5,000)
Figure 2: Percentage of people in each per capita income decile
living in a CEIBAL home
ICT for Education

ICT Colombia Report
improved in math, science, and language
abilities.
As a number of countries are introduc-
ing major computer or tablet programs
over the next few years, the World Bank
frequently cites the state of Maine in
its list of best practices, and Maine has
become an educational reference project
for countries around the world. Maine’s
project began in 2001, when Governor
Angus King launched a project to put
a laptop in the hands of every seventh
grader in the state; he succeeded in that
goal. Maine students have also signifi-
cantly improved in their coursework:
a 2011 study by the Maine Education
Policy Research Institute says that writ-
ing skills and state writing-test scores
have improved, and many students have
been able to move out of remedial math.
allows for extra time to focus on learning
how to best use technology.
Urrea agrees with Fullan that goal-
setting is crucial for the next stage in
Uruguay, but she sees opportunities,
and goals, beyond reading and math.
“Learning is also about learning to solve
anything,” she says, “to become more cre-
ative, solve problems, invent new things.”
Plan CEIBAL has already had an
impact on entrepreneurship and job
creation in the country (see “Entrepre-
neurship”): a new gaming sector has
rapidly grown in Uruguay and gained
international acclaim and exports, in part
catalyzed by Plan CEIBAL.
Plan CEIBAL is far from the only
laptop distribution program in Latin
America: Peru and Argentina have seen
major rollouts of computers for chil-
dren, as has Brazil, with smaller projects
throughout the continent. (Peru has dis-
tributed even more of the One Laptop
per Child model of laptop than Uruguay.)
One challenge in the Peruvian program
was that Internet connectivity was out of
the scope of the Ministry of Education,
and so computers were distributed even
when the school had no way to access the
Internet. In Brazil, according to a study by
the Inter-American Development Bank,
teacher training was critical, as were pre-
pilot projects to evaluate the design. In
Argentina’s San Luis Province, where one
such program was implemented, students
There is also evidence of gains in student
achievement in science.
Urrea points to a number of factors
in Maine’s success: the program started
small, first with 7th graders, and then it
expanded to other grades. The program
also incorporates plans to replace and
repair machines, to finance the project,
and to support teachers. “Their success
is in part their ability to overcome the
many challenges associated with such a
program,” says Urrea.
A number of other projects in the US
are ongoing, but none of them have lasted
long enough for significant evaluation.
Every student and teacher in Guilford
County, North Carolina’s middle schools
is to receive a tablet, with the under-
standing that teachers will be able to give
Flipping the Classroom
One benefit technology offers is the ability to, in effect,
“flip the classroom.” In such a model, students use the
technology (laptop, tablet) to learn the lesson at home,
and the teacher uses the class time to work with the
students at their levels.
A fascinating article in Wired (“How a Radical New
Teaching Method Could Unleash a Generation of
Geniuses,” October 2013), reports on a Mexican school
populated primarily with students whose families live
beside a dump. Though neither the classroom nor the
students had access to the Internet, the teacher had
access at home, and he decided to model his classroom
after the ideas of Sugata Mitra, who left computers
with children in India and recorded them as they guided
themselves through learning.
The Indian students were eventually able to solve com-
plicated questions in biology. The Mexican teacher used
his home computer to find answers to his students’
questions but let the students guide their own learn-
ing. The students in his class, whose families are among
Mexico’s poorest, were able to rise to the top in Mexi-
co’s achievement exams.
A New York Times article (“In ‘Flipped’ Classrooms, a
Method for Mastery,” October, 2013) also details the
potential for using technology to allow students to learn
the basics at home, working at their own pace, with
teachers then guiding in-class activities that allow the
students to demonstrate mastery of the material.
1
2
3
5
4
Equity
Integration with
Maine’s Learning
Results
Sustainability/
Avoiding
Obsolescence
Teacher Preparation
and Professional
Development
Economic
Development
The Maine Learning Technology Initiative
has at its core ﬁve operational goals:
SOURCE:MAINELEARNINGTECHNOLOGYINITIATIVE.
MAINEDEPARTMENTOFEDUCATION.
ICT for Education

ICT Colombia Report
more guided instruction to different lev-
els of achievement in the classroom. But
as of August 2013, 15 thousand tablets
had been pulled from schools because of
faulty hardware. The intent was similar
in Los Angeles, where there is a $1 bil-
lion plan to provide an iPad to every high
school student. This time, the tablets were
taken back from the students when the
students figured out ways to get around
security measures that blocked Internet
access. (Los Angeles had a similar tech-
nology introduction problem beginning
in 2001, where they spent $50 million
on reading software and computers; the
computers were not used or integrated
into classrooms, and broken hardware
was not fixed, because teachers had not
been appropriately trained. The 2001 pro-
gram was found not to have helped the
students improve their reading.)
According to the Inter-American
Development Bank, there is not enough
rigorous evaluation of the educational
impact of technology programs, or com-
parisons of these types of technology
interventions and other types of educa-
tional programs. The IADB evaluated the
Peruvian program and found no evidence
thus far of increases in math and language
test scores, but rather positive increases
in general cognitive skills. Urrea wrote
in a response to the evaluation that the
teachers had not changed their methodol-
ogy with the computers, and that “if there
are no changes to the way teachers teach
and children learn, there won’t be any
significant changes in children’s academic
performance.” She also mentions that the
report did not go deep enough to track
how computers were used to advance the
development of cognitive skills.
Urrea draws a number of lessons from
the various successes and failures of these
programs, both in the US and in Latin
America: “You need a clear goal, and the
design of a program that ensures that such
goals are accomplished. The plan includes
teacher training and development pro-
grams, local/online support, digital
support content, changes in the curri-
cula, etc. You need a strong IT team. You
need a strong community-based program
to engage parents, and other community
members, and more.”
SupportingTeachers
andStudents
n Of course, these efforts cannot survive
without the foundations on which they’re
built—both hardware and software. One
hardware model is a rugged, rather sim-
ple laptop, in the style of One Laptop per
Child. Another trend is the use of tablets.
Tablets have become increasingly popu-
lar, though, as Michael Trucano writes
in a World Bank EduTech blog, there is
no data to support the use of tablets over
any other type of hardware: “This is not to
say that there aren’t potentially compel-
ling reasons why purchasing tablets for
use in schools and/or by teachers or stu-
dents might make sense…rather that this
technology choice often seems driven by
assumption[s] rather than as a result of
careful deliberation.” Actually, he notes,
the line between tablets and laptops is
blurring, as tablets today (not Apple prod-
ucts, but Microsoft and Android-based
systems) may have keyboards, USB ports,
and other features that make them more
like small-scale laptops.
In terms of software, the develop-
ment of appropriate content, content
that engages students and teachers alike
and contributes to improved academic
achievement, creativity, and problem solv-
ing, is critical. Trucano points out that one
pitfall programs fall into is trying to copy
other educational systems rather than
developing local content. In Jordan, for
example, according to Michelle Selinger’s
chapter on education in Tim Unwin’s book
ICT4D: Information and Communica-
tion Technology for Development, teachers
were given laptops and data projectors.
The curricula were developed “based on
research on effective practice in the West,
but the actual e-curricula development
was undertaken in country by local media
developers and teachers from Jordanian
schools.”
When Plan CEIBAL leaders set about
developing content for use in the class-
rooms, one approach they took was to
translate videos from English into Span-
ish from the popular online site Khan
Academy, which began in 2006 with a
series of simple video tutorials. (Today
the site reaches millions of users with
thousands of videos, online tutorials, and
practice problems in math, science, and
the humanities, and has been incorpo-
rated into classrooms as well.) According
to education reporter John Higgins, who
has interviewed members of the team in
Uruguay, the project had access to about
1,200 translated videos in November
2012, and by May 2013 had translated
two thousand.
In September 2013, Khan Academy
en Español—the first foreign-language
offering—was released, offering the entire
Khan Academy, complete with online
mentors, to the world’s half-billion Span-
ish speakers. This offers a new online
SOURCE:KHANACADEMYABOUTPAGE
ONWWW.KHANACADEMY.ORG
ICT for Education

ICT Colombia Report
Gamification as a Potential Force for Education
Many see ‘gamification’—using games as a method
of achieving non-game goals—as a potential force for
education. Scot Osterweil, creative director of the MIT
Media Lab’s Education Arcade and a founding member
of the Learning Games Network, says that games can
take the playfulness that kids experience in much of
their lives and use that in their academics. Osterweil
has worked on two projects funded by the Gates
Foundation. In one, students can work collectively to
solve problems in high school biology and math. In the
second project, 10 weeks of
playing a language-learning
game helped immigrants
learn English significantly
more effectively than a
traditional 13-week course.
“This does not replace
the classroom,” Osterweil
stresses, “but rather games
in conjunction with teaching
can be quite valuable.”
Game development, according to the Media
Lab’s Mitch Resnick, can also provide students with
learning opportunities. His team created the Scratch
programming language and online community; millions
of projects have been shared by Scratch users ages
eight and older. In “Learn to Code, Code to Learn,” in
EdSurge, May 2013, Resnick described the variety of
diverse projects created around the world, and how
learning to code as a foundation for creativity has
changed the lives of the young users. “We find that
active members of the
Scratch community start
to think of themselves…
as creators and designers,
as people who can make
things with digital media, not
just browse, chat, and play
games… Scratch members
also begin to see the world in
new ways.”
resource for Colombian students and
classroom educators.
A number of startups to meet the
needs of teachers and students are emerg-
ing in Latin America. (“9 Latin American
education start-ups you should know,”
thenextweb.com, Feb. 15, 2013) Their
offerings range from tools to help teach-
ers, parents, and students communicate,
to offline classes, to Open English, a
year-long English language program
that connects students to native teach-
ers. Another Brazilian startup, Learncafe,
offers course certificates in classes such as
business management and technology.
According to an article on the site
LatinTrade, “E-Learning for the Twit-
ter Generation,” cloud-based sites and
platforms—such as Blackboard, Desire-
One innovative startup called Duolingo, founded by computer scientists
from Carnegie Mellon University (one of whom comes originally from
Guatemala), seeks to link language learning and access to web resources;
it can serve as both a resource for classroom education and for English-
language learning. Its founder was motivated by the paucity of web-based
information in Spanish. Today, the site has hundreds of thousands of users
who participate in a variety of language acquisition activities and then
go on to translate sentences. The end result is a crowd-sourced site that
translates documents for the Web.
2Learn and Moodle—are important tools
for educators wanting to create local con-
tent. Kuepa, an Argentinean company,
helps teachers manage classroom and
online resources, and provides some of
those resources. And as academic content
moves online, although the companies
thus far dominating in Latin America
are foreign ones, local enterprises such
as Competir and Kuepa, both Argentin-
ean, also have significant market share.
Education-focused accelerators to
help advance promising startups have
been appearing around the US: only
one existed in 2011—Palo Alto’s Imag-
ine K12—and today there are more than
15. In 2012, investment funding reached
$1.1 billion. Some education accelera-
tors are managed by massive education
companies, such as Kaplan’s Techstars
and Pearson’s partnership with Wash-
ington-based accelerator 1776. These
relationships are not all unmitigated suc-
cesses, and can be made or broken by the
skills or actions of their directors: one
accelerator recently came under fire for
the allegedly subpar performance of its
current leader and cofounder. Experts
stress that what makes many accelerators
successful is the investment, mentoring,
and tools made available for the partici-
pants.
In the US, an increasing number of
these startups are being founded by teach-
ers, who personally know the needs of the
classroom; and more education-focused
companies are gaining the trust of educa-
tors. Still, some remain wary of companies
SOURCE:DUOLINGO.COM
SCRATCHISAPROJECTOFTHELIFELONGKINDERGARTENGROUPATTHEMITMEDIALAB.
ICT for Education

ICT Colombia Report
whose main focus is their bottom line. As
a result, 19 US states have created policy
tools to assist in the creation of socially-
minded startups such as those focused
on education: they have made available a
new legal status called “benefit corpora-
tion status.” They do seek profits, but must
also be certified to meet social goals. This
gives startups that focus on education—
or poverty reduction, or environmental
issues—the ability to focus not on short-
term financial gain for their investors, but
rather long-term value.
No matter what the hardware or soft-
ware, all experts in the use of technology
in education—and all critics of the use
of technology thus far—warn and insist
that teachers are of paramount impor-
tance. School systems must invest in great
teachers, they must train those teachers to
use the technology, and they must enable
opportunities for teachers to learn from
and exchange ideas with one another.
In addition, the World Bank’s Michael
Trucano offers this advice: “Avoid depen-
dence on a single vendor.” In the World
Bank’s EduTech blog, he writes that
approaching the question of technology
just from a lowest-cost perspective could
lead to a local or national government
getting locked in to one vendor, which
can lead to increased costs in the future
if the government attempts to exit the
relationship. He also cautions that edu-
cational content in digital format carries
challenges in, for instance, intellectual
property rights, and that policy mak-
ers should be prepared to “help lobby
for changes that may be needed to help
ensure educational goals and objectives
are not compromised as a result of inad-
equate, outdated, or poorly drafted laws
and guidelines.”
MobileLearning
n Learning via mobile devices such as
phones is an area that holds promise, even
as computers remain central to school-
based learning around the world. As can
be seen in Colombia’s mobile literacy
program, Programa Nacional de Alfabet-
ización (designed for young adults and
for adults who have not gone through
conventional schools), there is real possi-
bility for improving education and access
to content on cell phones.
Teachers and students need to learn
how to utilize computers in the class-
room most effectively. The same goes for
projects such as BridgeIT, an initiative
of Nokia, the Pearson Foundation, the
United Nations Development Program,
and the International Youth Founda-
tion. In this model, teachers learn to use
smartphones with Internet connectiv-
ity and data projectors; they can access
multimedia resources and content for the
classroom, and screen educational videos
or science experiments. In a similar vein,
Nokia unveiled a pilot project in Kenya in
October 2012 to reach 10 schools via cell
phones, assisting teachers in their instruc-
tion of the sciences and mathematics.
Students in Argentina are now using
phones through a program called EMIA-
SMILE that provides the opportunity to
develop writing and scientific skills by
creating and answering questions via a
local network. BridgeIT has partnered
with various entities in Chile to help the
government reach underserved commu-
nities, and has created a new program in
Colombia called Raíces de Aprendizaje
Móvil.
Some challenges in these programs
include lack of 3G or 4G network cover-
age, and an absence of clear guidelines
and goals for how to implement use of the
phones in the classrooms. And more gov-
ernments are now focusing on computers
in the classroom, rather than phones. Still,
because phones can serve as a method of
accessing online content, some experts say
the important thing is to focus on content
rather than on what device is used.
OnlineLearning
n Today, massive open online courses, or
MOOCs, are capturing the imagination of
curious learners around the world. In this
model, hundreds, even thousands of stu-
dents around the world can participate at
the same time in a classes taught by some
of the top professors in their fields from
the world’s leading universities. A number
of universities are rapidly creating online
courses through platforms such as Udac-
ity and Coursera, both founded by Stan-
ford professors, and edX, the nonprofit
platform of Harvard and MIT.
The results, however, are mixed. For
one MIT electronic circuits class, 155
thousand signed up—but only seven
thousand, or 5 percent, passed the class.
The majority of the online classes thus far
appear to be in science and technology,
where problems can be answered and ver-
ified online. There are concerns about the
dropout rate, the need to keep students
engaged, and ways to maintain the level
of academic and intellectual achievement.
One opportunity that MOOCs offer
to emerging or middle economies is the
opportunity to merge classroom or after-
school learning with distance videos,
what is known as blended learning. The
New York Times profiled a high school
in Mongolia, where the principal, who
had himself graduated from MIT in 2009
(the first Mongolian to do so), provided
classroom support—in the form of both
teacher guidance and the necessary sup-
plies—for students to take the edX MIT
class Circuits and Electronics. While this
experience exposed all students in the
More than 6.7 millionstudents
were taking at least one online course
during the fall 2011 term, an increase of
570,000 students over the previous year.
SOURCE:HTTP://SLOANCONSORTIUM.ORG
BABSONSTUDY:OVER6.7MILLIONSTUDENTSLEARNINGONLINE
ICT for Education

ICT Colombia Report
classroom to the potential for academic
advancement, one student in particular
soared. He was 15 at the time, but he was
one of only 340 of the 150 thousand orig-
inal students to receive a perfect score
in the sophomore-level class. He is now
attending MIT, and he plans to use his
time at MIT to develop solutions to ben-
efit his home country. (In response to his
success, edX began purposefully organiz-
ing such blended classes.)
An electrical-engineering professor
at the University of El Salvador took part
in an edX electronic-circuits course him-
self, then signed up 50 students at the
university to take the course. He acted as
their mentor, making himself available for
online discussions and weekly labs.
Rwanda also has set up a prototype
blended-learning program, as described
in an October, 2013 Scientific American
article, “Learning in the Digital Age.”
Kepler is a pilot university program that
marries local instructors with online
videos for a small number of Rwandan
students, who are selected after a highly
competitive series of applications and
interviews. The program appears to be
significantly cheaper per student than tra-
ditional university courses, and it allows
students to achieve a level of learning
that meets international standards. At
the moment this program is partnering
with Southern New Hampshire Univer-
sity, which will award an associate of arts
degree with a concentration in business.
Kepler hopes to add additional bache-
lor’s degrees, in fields such as business
administration and computer science,
from other educational institutions.
This sort of program is not only use-
ful in underserved countries like Rwanda.
Though India is recognized internation-
ally for the quality of its engineering
schools and graduates, that holds true
only for the very top universities. In the
Scientific American article, Vern Agarwal,
cofounder and chief operating officer of
the assessment company Aspiring Minds,
states that only about 7 percent of India’s
engineering graduates meet international
standards for the basics of coding. To
meet the local need, Microsoft Research
is now working on a pilot project—setting
up Massively Empowered Classrooms, or
MECs—that offers online classes taught
by Indian professors, designed to fit into
existing Indian engineering schools.
A limiting factor to the deployment
of such opportunities is English liter-
acy. This is an area in which Colombian
school children appear to possess insuf-
ficient skills. Fullan, in evaluating Plan
CEIBAL in Uruguay, pointed to English
(and Spanish) literacy as a key goal in the
next stage of the project. Uruguay has
partnered with the British Council and
(as one method to achieve the goal) is
using distance-learning videos with native
English speakers. While Colombia will of
course need to continue developing locally
appropriate content in Spanish, high lev-
els of English literacy will be critical in
order for teachers and students to take
advantage of the educational opportuni-
ties that exist online.
In online learning, the growth
opportunities for Latin America—and
for Colombia—are huge. According to
Sam Adkins, chief research officer at
the Washington-based market research
company Ambient Insight, e-learning
revenues in Latin America could reach
$2.29 billion in 2016, almost double the
2011 figure. He estimates that Brazil will
grow fastest, followed by Colombia and
Bolivia.
Urrea sees opportunities in Colom-
bia in the world of online learning: she
learned that edX has no Latin Ameri-
can partners in its lists of universities,
and believes that Colombian universi-
ties could promote their own courses,
or translate edX courses for use within
Colombia.
Another opportunity exists for com-
panies that develop e-learning for export.
Imaginologia, based in Brazil, creates
online courses for the health-care indus-
try and sells them to Portuguese-speaking
African countries. There is plenty of mar-
ket share throughout Latin America for
such e-learning initiatives.
Conclusion
n One clear point that emerges from all
these examples is that access to technol-
ogy—computers, the Internet, mobile
phones, distance learning—is not
enough. Motivated students will find
ways to learn, but technology access
alone is not sufficient for the majority of
students. Instead, classroom technology
programs must establish clear goals that
include teacher training and curricu-
lum changes, along with the necessary
IT development and support for them.
While online learning has been growing
rapidly, perhaps the greatest opportuni-
ties lie in blending online learning with
in-person classes, to bring the very best
instruction from around the world to
help teachers and students in Colombia.
Colombian universities and enterprises
also have the opportunity to develop
online learning and education apps that
could be used throughout the Spanish-
speaking world.
2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010
2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010
2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010
31.3%28.6%
24.1%21.6%19.6%18.2%
13.5%11.7%9.6%
31.3%28.6%
24.1%21.6%19.6%18.2%
13.5%11.7%9.6%
31.3%28.6%
24.1%21.6%19.6%18.2%
13.5%11.7%9.6%
SOURCE:BABSONSURVEYRESEARCHGROUP
Education Gets Disrupted, Gradually
The percentage of US college students enrolled in at least one online course
ICT for Education

DevelopingTalent
IN THIS SECTION
Overview
Developing ICT Skills
Leveraging Partnerships
University Reforms to Promote Success
n As Colombia heads into the new digi-
tal economy, with an increasing focus on
ICT in all areas of society, it will rely on a
cadre of professionals who can work in the
ICT industry, utilize ICT in government
and private enterprises, and employ ICT
in such diverse sectors as education and
health care.
Bringing this about will require a
wealth of talents. First and foremost
is the necessity of nurturing computer
engineers, coders, programmers—pro-
fessionals for all aspects of what can be
considered the foundation of the digi-
tal world. These skills are necessary but
not sufficient to ensure success, however.
The talent of the future will also require
greater competence in skills like prod-
uct design, management, and leadership.
A new generation of chief information
officers, or CIOs, will need both techni-
cal and management skills. The digital
workers of the future will include design-
ers, coders, teachers, entrepreneurs—and
government officials.
27
STUARTBRADFORD

ICTtoTransformColombia

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