Dynamic digital inclusion value chain

Posted by irislapinski on August 31st, 2009

It’s been a while since my last blog post, but I have been very busy making sense, analysing and writing the final report for our feasibility study. So now it’s more than time to share my next wave of posts with the world, in order to explain the reasoning of what we have decided to do next.

The first one is around what I would like to call the “digital inclusion value chain”. I know it sounds very corporate, but basically one thing I set out to do was to understand how different organisations & players create value in the space – and how this has actually changed over the last decade. An even though few people talk about this in the space of digital inclusion there is of course a market for ideas and resources where some people are more successful than others in surviving. So you might also call it “historical development of digital inclusion activities and their value today” to keep it simple I call it value chain.

I started to come to grips with this when I talked to some two veterans of digital inclusion:

• Julie Harries from Cosmic in Devon and;
• Gary Copitch from People’s Voice Media in Manchester.

Both organisations are relatively small, but what makes them different from many less successful organisations in my view is that they survived because they constantly adapted to changes in demand, fundring sources and policy initiatives. Let me illustrate what I mean with this.

From its initial starting point in youth ICT training Cosmic has expanded to:

• website services
• 3rd & public sector IT training services
• IT technical support
• IT consultancy

From its founding activity of provinding information sources for community organisations PVM has expanded to:

• Basic ICT skills training
• ICT procurement
• IT technical support
• Social media & community reporters

While Cosmic and PVM do not offer exactly the same type of services, there are many overlaps especially around IT technical support and training. So to sum up my visits and conversations with many different people I have create how the UK digital inclusion value chain has developed over the last decade or so:

As you can see I have added a timeline to illustrate when the respective services reached their peak of attention and value before becoming increasingly commoditised. So while access to IT was considered a high-value and high-priority activity in the late 1990s, social and digital media skills are seen as leading edge today.

Equally when you look at activity levels and focus today (which you could equal with mind share and new resources dedicated to it) areas like Internet cafes and computer recycling services have nearly but disappeared in the UK market, while they were vibrant only a few years back. Also website design services has declined sharply due to the creation of free and easy-to-use webtools like WordPress which allow nearly everybody to create and often even customised websites themselves:

I think you won’t be surprised to learn that initiatives like Talk About Local, MySociety and the Birmingham Social Media Surgeries are receiving a lot of attentioned because they are very well placed in the current buzz about how to use social media effectively in politics, community development and campaigning. Channel 4′s public innovation fund 4iP is investing in many of them because theyclearly address a current need.

So if this is what the digital inclusion value chain looks like today with different degrees of activitiy, I started to ask myself the following question shamelessly copied from Sir Ronald Cohen, co-founder of Apax Partners and Bridges Ventures:

What is the next bounce of the ball for digital inclusion? What are the next topics people are likely to focus on and what are trends in the telecommunication and Internet markets that are relevant to the digital inclusion debate?

One good source to look for trends are Ofcom’s annual Communication Market Reports which are published each year in August. Also the Digital Britain final report and many conversations with people involved in the field, young people using technology and observations of how people are using technology in their daily lives helped.

My conclusion for the digital inclusion value chain was:

• Universal high-speed broadband as a universal utility
• Mobile Internet skills based on the growth in mobile apps and smartphones

So while universal high-speed broadband is the continuation of the access to IT focus in the 1990s, mobile Internet skills are the extension of the digital inclusion focus on skills and training in order to close the Digital Divide. If you need a reminder of how broad the definition of digital inclusion is in the UK, please have a look at this post.

If you are still doubting now that digital inclusion is actually a very dynamic concept, you might want to have a look at the most recent Annual Information Society Report 2009 that was published by the European Commission at the beginning of August. There the EC introduced the new concept of a Second Digital Divide based on the quality of Internet use:

Going beyond basic use of the internet, policy on eInclusion also recognises the importance of reducing disparities in the quality of internet use, the so-called Second Digital Divide. Data show that digital disparities also exist between socioeconomic groups with regard to the types of activities undertaken and the intensity with which they are performed. Results suggest that while all internet users, regardless of age or education, use the internet for communication and for access to information, there are sharp differences, particularly by age, for the more advanced services.

Since we are living in a digital age with new technologies being developed constantly, digital inclusion as a political and socio-economic agenda will not go away any time soon with these redefinitions, but dynamically change over time…

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