IT Diffusion & Socio Economic Change In Egypt

Although new information handling technologies have recently been widely disseminated as tools for socio-economic development, they cannot be used in the same ways as in the industrialized countries for which they were designed. Three things at least distinguish the experience of developing countries. The first is the context of their bureaucratic, administrative, managerial and political systems and the differing expectations of users. The second is attitude towards information technology and the resources which must be used to implement ambitious systems. The third is the content of information analysis and use in developing countries, where both application areas and interpretive assumptions are likely to be radically different from the experiences of managers and administrators in industrialized countries. This paper describes and analyses the experience of the Egyptian government in spreading the awareness of information technology and its use in managing development planning for socio-economic change. The experience has been one of building multiple information handling and decision support systems in very messy, turbulent and changing environments. The successes over the past eight years by the Cabinet in implementing and sustaining state of the art decision support systems in Egypt’s governorates [local administrations] as well as for central governmental decision making holds many lessons for the implementation of sophisticated systems under conditions of extreme difficulty. The analysis of these experiences offers insight into a variety of problems for designers, implementors and users of information and decision support systems for managing socioeconomic change. This paper concludes with analytical methods and guidelines for the future implementation of similar projects in developing countries which may with to benefit from the successes of Egypt’s Cabinet Information and Decision Support Center.