Information technology and the Internet: the Singapore experience

Singapore, a small nation with limited resources, has in three decades transformed itself from a British colony to one of the seven Asian economic tigers registering high economic growth. The borderless world of cyberspace has spawn a new digital global economy. To spur Singapore on to new economic growth, the government has identified information technology (IT) as the strategic tool. This paper presents the IT experience of Singapore in the 1980s and the latest IT plan (IT2000) for the 1990s and beyond to build a national information infrastructure (NII) to ensure Singapore’s continuous growth in the future. The initiatives and incentives taken by the government to promote the use of the NII and snapshots of the progress of the NII deployment to date are discussed. In particular, the paper focuses on the evolution of Internet in Singapore; it highlights its phenomenal growth and how this growth has spurred the development of an Internet infrastructure, Internet services and applications, and Internet-related policies. Internet has become an integral part and a key component of the NII and is hailed as the de facto mechanism for making the services of the NII available to the masses. It has accelerated the NII’s development and deployment, despite the fact that it was never in the blueprint of IT2000. The paper concludes by examining the challenges faced in fulfilling the IT2000 vision and how Singapore can overcome the obstacles. With the strong IT infrastructure laid and the government’s continuous support and commitment to IT development, it is well poised to harness existing and new technologies and effectively deploy them for economic growth and realisation of the IT2000 vision.