The European e-Business Report The European e ... - empirica

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The European E-Business Report 2005 3.3 e-Business in the Netherlands by Ronald Batenburg, Utrecht University, The Netherlands Introduction This article presents some of the current trends and initiatives with respect to e-business in the Netherlands. Without claiming to be complete, we will attempt to provide a balanced picture of both the market developments and policy-related e-business projects. The chapter is divided into three sections. Firstly, the ICT-sector is described including the role of governmental and policy initiatives to support and enable ICT research and development in the Netherlands. This description is completed with a policy initiative example to enhance ICT for the elderly. The second section of this chapter addresses the actual state of and trends in ICT and e-business adoption. These developments are presented against other European countries in order to describe the Dutch situation in international perspective. The article finishes with a summary and concluding remarks. 3.3.1 The ICT sector and E-business policy and in The Netherlands We start this section by describing the organisations that develop, build, sell, consult and support the actual products and services of the Dutch e-business industry, i.e. the ICT companies. The Netherlands holds a prominent tradition in mathematics and theoretical computer science, and as of now there is an active community of programmers, software developers and even hackers. Just before and after the year 2000 however, the Dutch ICT industry transformed more and more into clusters of industries dedicated to high-skilled activities as research, product development and consultancy in IT and ICT. The ICT industry in the Netherlands With some exceptions, the mainstream of Dutch initiatives in IT and ICT is oriented to embedded software, product software and related services. A spectacular example of product software entrepreneurship is the BAAN company, which managed to achieve a significant market share of the specialised market for Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). As of now, BAAN and its ERP-software is part of the larger SSA Global, as it did not recover from a dramatic drop in shareholder support after financial failures in 2000. At the same time however, many other Dutch IT-vendors such as Exact, Unit4Agresso, AFAS and Grote Beer have successfully applied the business model of "product software"; developing standard software and IT-solutions once and then selling it many times, thereby optimising the principle of the network or information economy. In embedded software, Philips and ASML are prominent players, as well as the recent success story of navigation software producer Tom Tom. In addition, several major international ICT (consultancy) companies have important branches in the Netherlands, for example Atos Origin (including Sogeti), Accenture, Cap Gemini, CISCO, Deloitte, EDS, IBM, KPMG, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, as well as ICT companies like Ordina and Pentascope that are national-oriented. As of 2003, nearly 24,000 ICT-companies were active in the Netherlands, over 276,000 persons employed in ICT-related professions and 4.4 million employees are PC-users (Statistics Netherlands, 2005). Up to 2003, the proportion of ICT-companies within the Dutch population of enterprises increased constantly to 3.5%. In terms of economic value, it is estimated that 20% of the economic growth between 1996 and 2000 was accounted for by the ICT-sector, in particular because of high annual investments. The value added of the ICT-sector to the Dutch General Domestic Product (GPD) is about 1% and decreases after the year 2001. As is internationally the case, the Dutch ICT-sector significantly changed from a rapidly growing mode to a state of consolidation and, in some cases, reduction. 179
The European E-Business Report 2005 Unlike most of the economic sectors in the Netherlands, the ICT industry has been weakly organised for a long time. At the beginning of the 1990’s, the Dutch ICT sector was sharply divided between the hardware and software producers. Hardware vendors aimed at being differentiated from software companies as being the ‘real’ technology initiators, while the software firms in return considered the hardware firms as over-skilled ‘box-producers’. This changed with the emergence of the internet, enterprise information systems and network technology. As the distinction between hardware and software became irrelevant, the two former branches merged in the mid nineties and were named respectively ‘the Dutch IT Federation’, ‘ICT Netherlands’ and currently (Dutch) ‘ICT Services’. There are many challenges for the Dutch ICT Services organisations, as the industry holds a somewhat disadvantageous image for its immature customer service and personnel management. Although most of the ICT companies in the Netherlands have grown to become highly professional organisations (or have been taken over by professional multinational corporations), the industry is still known for its unintended fluctuations in job opportunities and severe difficulties in communicating the benefits of their product and services for society, enterprises and individuals. Research on ICT With regard to the ICT domain itself, a steady number of policy initiatives within the Netherlands are being taken to coordinate and drive its research and development in both business and academia. A good example is the ‘National Research Agenda for ICT’, a joint initiative of the Council for Physical Science of the National Science Foundation and the Technology Foundation of the Ministry of Economic Affairs. In their latest report, the agenda is defined for 2005-2010 by the following themes: • Design and development methods • Digital security • The network society • The data explosion • The digital experience • Intelligent systems • The invisible computer • The virtual laboratory • The computer of the future As can been seen, the themes hold strong anchors in the hardware and software technology, but also include additional domains such as society, the economy, entertainment and even arts. This is doubtless strongly intertwined with the particular mission of the Ministry of Economic Affairs that has set its focus on boosting innovation within the Dutch society and economy. In line with this, recently the “ICT Director Organization for ICT Research and Innovation” has been founded to provide additional budgets for innovation and economic proliferation. Its major aim is to improve the leverage of ICT for citizens, business and governments. ICT use in the public sector In the recent years, the Dutch government is catching up on its adoption and usage of ICT but still holds a moderate position compared to other European countries. In 2000, the Dutch expenditure on public administration ICT on central, local and regional levels was 0.27% of its GDP, while 0.3% was the EU-15 average (EU, 2005). Since then, large investments have been made in online governmental services. In 2003, 65% of the Dutch governmental services were online, against 45% at the average EU15-level (EU, 2005). Other figures published by Statistics Netherlands showed that 70% of the Dutch basic public services were available on the internet in 2004 while the European average appeared to be 72% in that same year (Statistics Netherlands, 2005). 180
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