ICT more commonplace in Mediterranean - survey

The use of information and communications technology in industries in the Mediterranean region, including Malta, is regarded as an investment and most companies say they either use e-business tools or intend to soon.

These are the findings of a survey on competencies and training needs in ICT and e-business carried out chiefly among SMEs in 11 countries of the Mediterranean region last year. The countries surveyed are Algeria, Cyprus, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Malta, Morocco, Palestine, Syria, Turkey and Tunisia.

For the past three years these countries actively participated in the MEDFORIST project that concerns the implementation of a Euro-Mediterranean network for sharing IST learning resources. It is sponsored by the European Commission through its EUMEDIS initiative. Malta participated through EAN Malta and the Institute for Tourism Studies (ITS).

The survey found that, in general, ICT is mainly used for administrative and commercial purposes and is considered an investment. Its budget is allocated most of the time to upgrading, creating new services and maintenance. The majority of surveyed companies have noticed improvements in work organisation, time saving and cost reduction. However, they faced problems in training employees, implementation costs and lack of maturity of the market.

In the survey "e-business" has been defined as "transforming key business processes by using Internet technologies".

Over 60 per cent of the enterprises in Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria declared having introduced e-business tools. For Cyprus, Malta, Morocco, Turkey and Tunisia, the percentages vary between 30 per cent and 50 per cent.

The firms which did not use e-business tools yet, in nearly all countries, intend to do so (excepted for Algeria, Cyprus and Tunisia) but for most of them e-business will be implemented in further than one year, which means in a mid-term perspective.

The section on needs in training shows that staff is trained to new technologies as frequently as the need arises. The training addresses most staff in all positions. The needs are mainly in the top managerial and the most qualified positions.

It is clear from the survey that most of the countries look for university and high school graduates when they recruit. However, vocational education has its success, mainly in Algeria, Egypt and Malta and at a lower degree in Syria and Tunisia.

While the aggregate results for the 11 countries have been just released, the full results of the survey in Malta were released late last year.

The major findings of the survey confirm that the update of e-business by Maltese enterprises is still at an early stage, but nevertheless encouraging, especially with the positive attitude the majority of institutions have towards e-business.

However, the exact understanding of the term "e-business" may not be clear enough to some institutions, and this may have affected the encouraging but still low take-up (63.6 per cent of respondents replied they did not introduce e-business tools).

The benefits of e-business are clear, and seem to affect the core of businesses: moderate to significant improvements were registered in organisation, turnover, relations with clients, finding new clients and markets, and competition.

Although the competencies needed for ICT use and e-business seem to be available in Malta, there are still problems with putting e-business tools into practise and adopting the tools in a positive way.

For more information on the MEDFORIST project and the survey results visit www.medforist-malta.com .