South African information technology policy is part of a broad front of new thinking on a range of issues, such as government communications, telecommunications, education and health. The central thread connecting the initiatives is the need for innovative approaches to the social and economic challenges faced by our developing society. Innovation is a matter of survival. This is also an international perception in a number of countries. The Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) defines a national system of innovation as ``a network of institutions in the public and private sectors whose activities and actions initiate, import and diffuse new technologies.'' What is needed is a national plan for enabling these components to work on commonly perceived national goals, particularly for improving quality of life and for economic development.
The new Science and Technology White Paper (October 1996) proposes a National System of Innovation [11]. The white paper comments on the role of Information Technology in words that closely echo those of the ISAD position paper on the Development of the Information Community:
The potential of information technology (IT) needs to be captured to serve people issues such as supporting education, providing household services and enabling social development. As a developing country, South Africa needs to ask certain questions with respect to the information revolution:
- What should we do to prevent being marginalized by the accelerating rate of innovation in information technology in the world?
- How can we participate globally without merely throwing open our markets to foreign products, thus increasing our dependency on the developed world?
- How can we empower ourselves with a capacity for IT innovation?
Information technology is a crucial enabler of innovative solutions to the challenges of the developing world. It will allow a country to leap-frog a number of stages of development and immediately apply the most effective solutions.
Information technology is also vitally dependent on a national culture that supports innovation. So information technology both supports innovation and is dependent on effective innovation for its development.
As the white paper states:
A major initiative of this White Paper is the establishment of an Innovation Fund which will promote large-scale projects, involving participants from throughout the national system of innovation, and which will focus attention on the major themes of government pertinent to this White Paper, namely competitiveness, quality of life, environmental sustainability, and on harnessing information technology to the needs of our society and economy.
What is missing in the white paper on Science and Technology is a clearer view of how this system of innovation will work in the field of Information Technology. The Science and Technology policy making process will be supported by two initiatives of the DACST. The National Science and Technology Audit [12] and the Research and Technology Foresight Programme [13]. Early indications are that an equal amount of lobbying will be necessary for these initiatives to do justice to the key role of IT in our country --- in particular the foresight programme must have a study devoted to Information Technology by itself and not as part of some other field.
The universal enabling role of IT does result in attempts to include IT in the single sector of social activity in which it is judged by a particular group to be ``most enabling''. The fact is that IT is a meta-sector, it supports every sector over the whole range of human activities. This role will only become more pervasive as we move to a realization of the information society. The special enabling role of IT has to be recognized and attempts to identify ``the'' single favoured sector is fundamentally mistaken and damaging to social and economic development. Funding, training and decision making can be adversely influenced by limited classification.