Ohio Completes Assessment of E-Com Readiness

According to a new report by a public-private collaborative project called Ecom-Ohio, Ohio lags many others in the “Net” Economy. The group draws attention to the state’s digital divide among certain population groups and laments slow Internet adoption in small and medium-sized businesses and a lack of public incentives and investment to help correct the situation.

The Statewide Report on Ohio’s Readiness for Global Electronic Commerce uses 22 key indicators to measure the state’s performance and preparedness for an information economy against a set of national benchmarks established by the Computer Systems Policy Project (CSPP) in 1998. CSPP is a coalition of 11 CEOs for some of the nation’s largest information technology companies. The benchmarks and CSPP assessment process helps a locality or region determine at which of four possible stages the community currently resides and what specific steps are necessary to move to the next, higher stage of e-commerce readiness. Ecom-Ohio is believed to be the first statewide application of the CSPP benchmarks.

Ecom-Ohio found the overall infrastructure or backbone made the state one of the most connected in the country, yet 90 percent of the dialup connections were not robust enough to support high bandwidth applications. The group recommends the development of market-led incentives such as aggregating public demand or developing private sector buying cooperatives. Examples of each method have been presented in earlier issues of the SSTI Weekly Digest (see our web site at http://www.ssti.org/Digest/2000/headlines00.htm for archived articles on Virginia in 1/7/00 and Berkshire Connection in 2/25/00).

Other recommendations from the report include:

• ensure the state’s economic development tools are defined broadly enough to support the information infrastructure needs of Ohio’s growing companies
• provide targeted incentives to boost connectivity in the state’s underserved areas 
• since only 14 percent of Ohio businesses maintain web sites, the state should provide resources, training and a toolkit to small businesses to help them to get online.
• use government as a leader in e-procurement and e-business transactions when interacting with Ohio businesses

Ecom-Ohio is chaired by the Ohio Board of Regents and NCR Corporation. Staff support was provided by the Technology Policy Group of the Ohio Supercomputer Center. Pari Sabety, director of the group and author of the report, led a popular workshop covering the topic at SSTI’s annual conference last year in Indianapolis. More information, including several regional reports and graphs on Ohio’s readiness for global electronic commerce, can be viewed at: http://www.ecom-ohio.org/ More information on the 22 CSPP benchmarks can be found at: http://www.cspp.org