The annual G20 summit, held this year in Brisbane, Australia, has concluded. It follows by a week the conclusion of the 15th Cloud Expo and 3rd @ThingsExpo in Santa Clara, CA.
I could argue that the latter events are more significant than the G20 summit.
To be sure, there is nothing of more importance in the short term than a meeting of the top leaders of the world’s largest nations. Imagine being able to namedrop Obama, Putin, Xi, Merkel, Cameron and others from your recent Australian holiday. Imagine further that your little conclave included the heads of other very large nations from Asia Pacific, South America, and Africa.
It’s In Our Hands
But the longer term is to a large degree in the hands of technologists. There are 3 trillion dollars spent worldwide on information technology and telecommunications, representing about 4 percent of the global economy and driving most of the other 96 percent.
It is technology, particularly the cloud computing, Big Data & analytics, and IoT things that will underpin any great gains in energy use, healthcare and food, transportation, and government improvements over the coming decades. Politicians come and go, but technology is steadfast.
This G20 summit was noted for various public scoldings given to Russian President Vladimir Putin by Western leaders. A little bit of that apparently went a long way for him, as he decided to leave for home before the summit officially concluded so that he could catch up on his sleep and put a full day in the office after the wild week-end.
Significant as the contretemps may prove to be, there are thousands upon thousands of people among the G20 governments who will be working on implementing the thousands upon thousands of words in the official documents that have emanated from the summit.
But…
Here’s the problem: technology isn’t mentioned in those documents.
Each of the G20 members has published a Comprehensive Growth Strategy document and an Employment Plan document. The goal is to add an additional 2 percentage points to the global GDP – about $1.5 trillion – over the next few years. The G20 members further believe their activities will create positive “spillover” effects to the rest of the world.
The efforts are focused on macroeconomic levers – mostly setting interest rates – and generally accepted worthy goals such as increasing trade, reducing bureaucratic impediments, bringing more women into the workforce, educating young people, and improving basic infrastructure. Private-public partnerships, the holy grail of government planning today, is mentioned. Ritual commitments to bolstering small and medium businesses are proferred.
The lack of specific commitment to information technology reflects a reality that almost four decades after the PC revolution was launched, there is a disconnect between technology and government, and a lack of technological understanding by politicians worldwide.
We Must Understand
The technology industry at all levels must appreciate that what often appear to them as obtuse, strutting buffoons are in fact the people who are running the world. They have power.
If the Russians want to station some fierce naval warships off the coast of Australia to accompany their leader’s arrival, they can. If the House of Saudi tires of a plunging oil price and wants to manipulate it, it can. If the leader of Canada wants to get into the face of one of the two most powerful people in the world and tell him to bug out of Ukraine, he can.
Steve Jobs’s un-ironic goal of denting the universe carries no weight among a G20 crowd that dent almost anything it wants to here on Planet Earth.
Our Research
Our research at the Tau Institute over the past few years has created a unique look at the nations of the world and how they have committed to information technology on a relative basis. We show which countries are doing the most with what they have, and which countries lead among their peers by region and income tier.
Among the G20, South Korea is the clear leader. South Korea leads the world, in fact. New Zealand is not an official G20 country but was represented in Brisbane as part of an informal ANZAC hosting of the summit. New Zealand finishes number two in our global rankings.
Other countries that do very well in our rankings among the G20 include the UK, Germany, Canada, Japan, and Australia. The US could do better on a relative basis, as could the rest of the G20 nations. There is promise and potential for all in this group, as well as among all the 103 nations that we survey.
Act
With luck, the world geopolitical situation won’t become more tense after the tense week-end in Brisbane. Government staffs will go back to work, lip service will be paid to many of the Brisbane commitments, but real change will be effected as well. In particular, the Brisbane documents cite energy efficiency and distribution as a key goal, and much of the wording reads like a blueprint for IoT implementation.
I’ll report more on specific country plans over the next few weeks. Meanwhile, the technology industry ignores politicians at our mutual peril, and we must be clear about how serious, explicit commitments to information technology will be the key to the G20 approaching and reaching its ambitious economic development goals.