2007, Vol.14, No.4

Informatization Policy 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 4.08

pISSN : 1598-3498
https://journal.kci.go.kr/nia

In order to find an information society model applicable to Korea, this paper analyzes characteristics of Korea’s IT development in four aspects of IT strategies and goals, the government, businesses, and the public. First, in terms of IT strategies and goals, Korea has set very aggressive goals and concentrated its capacity on them to achieve fast IT development. Second, the government has played the most important and leading role in the nation’s IT development by setting the direction of IT development and providing indirect support to businesses and the public. Third, businesses have formed an innovation-oriented coalition under the support of the government and successfully developed state-of-the-art technologies and services. Fourth, the public has created effective demands for new IT services, enabling a compressed development of IT in Korea, benefitted from the government’s efforts to lay a foundation for information society. Consequently, since now Korea’s structural characteristics are changing a lot, this paper suggests that Korea should find a new information society model in preparation for the upcoming ubiquitous computing era.

At present, e-government of Korea is cited as one of success cases in the global community. This reputation is the result of enabling interactions among a variety of factors including environments, input(political leadership, vision and policy goals, proper prioritization of projects), process(lead organizations, financial resources, technical resources), feedback and learning mechanism. During the past 20 years broken down into three periods of development, presidents from Chun Doo-whan to Rho Moo-hyun have consistently exerted strong political leadership, and envisioned their policy goals and set proper prioritization. In addition, institutional arrangements have been developed in ways of allocating organizational, legal, financial, and technical resources optimally. Especially, the Ministry of Information and Communication and the National Computerization Agency is regarded as a successful institutional building case for the success of e-government. Irrespective of this success, Korea is coping with the difficult tasks in order to continue the success of nextgeneration e-government: demand-side considerations, building government wide architecture, redesigning of inter-agency business processes and the fostering of information industry, and rearranging institutions and financial resources.

With subscription to broadband Internet services reaching 10 million households in 2002, Korea has been dubbed the top broadband nation by international organizations such as ITU and OECD. National infrastructure plays a very important role in the industrial development of a nation. In particular, IT infrastructure has made Korea the world’s No. 1 for the first time in history. This is attributed to the informatization policy that has been constantly pursued for the last 20 years. In keeping with such informatization policy, the project on building the infra for high-speed communication network had been continuously carried out from 1995 to 2005 since the newly established Ministry of Information and Communications (MIC) in 1994. The government’s aggressive and relentless efforts to implement such policy, Korea's unique business model, selection of ADSL techniques for initial Infra deployment, high priority investment to isolated and vulnerable areas from IT distribution such as schools and rural districts, establishment of a pro-cyclical investment structure led by the government, and the country’s cultural and environmental characteristics are cited as the key success factors. Today, the construction of the high-speed infrastructure over the whole nation is nearly complete. The next step is upgrading the infrastructure by one notch to provide telecommunications and broadcasting convergence services such as IPTV, giga internet services. A new strategy that will enable Korea to sustain its global leadership in the IT field is also required.