About Intramis

With the realization that increased use of information and communication technologies (ICT's) has a positive effect on economic development, policy-makers, private enterprises, civil society and scholars have been struggling to identify strategies to further enable this process.

Rooted in the understanding that “[w]hile everything matters in the Information Society, not everything matters the same,” there has been an ongoing effort to identify and quantify meaningful “information indicators” which can provide guidance for technology policy and development strategies.

Because of ICT's centrality to issues of economic growth, as well as to social, cultural and political factors, numerous attempts are underway to systematically investigate it in the areas of statistics, social and behavioral sciences, law and policy, economics and information technology.

“E-readiness assessments” have been conducted in nearly every country on the globe. The problem is that there is no generally accepted theory for this field, and the methodologies that have been used are primarily descriptive, rather than explanatory and predictive.

One thing these studies have in common is the use of a statistical approach to studying multiple factors (indicators) to try to identify relationships (correlation and/or causality) between ICT and other economic and non-economic factors. This presents problems related both to the data and to the theory used to analyze it.

While it is possible to “count” many items as potential indicators, the analysis of the data needs to be guided by theory, not just random application of available statistical tools, and the area of guiding theory is still lacking.

The development of a coherent theory and its application to data in a meaningful way, presents a challenge on the scale of a “grand challenge” in the natural sciences. This project is a major, inter- and multi-disciplinary, global intellectual challenge.

We look forward to engaging in a dialogue with our colleagues to develop a research agenda to move these studies forward.