Ofcom’s Consumer Panel survey[i]  and the response from ‘Help the Aged’, serves as a timely reminder of the growing gap between the digital ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’.  

For years it’s been easy to ignore - to leave it aside as a ‘bridge to cross when, or if, we come to it’.  The ‘digital divide’ is now an urgent issue.   It’s not somebody else’s problem.  It’s not a distant 3^rd world anxiety.   Nor is it just about inner city or rural deprivation, or some concern about ‘exclusion’ in an aging society.

It’s an enterprise issue.  There are umpteen ‘digital divide’ variants.   Many of these impact directly on businesses and at all levels of government and public sector agencies. 

Back in 2001 broadband awareness was still quite low despite the campaign slogans from technology evangelists.  ‘Broadband is like hot water – no longer a luxury’, we shouted.   Now in 2006 we can see rural exchanges once declared as never ever likely to need broadband, with at least 25% take-up – but still we all seem slow to grasp these new realities.

Inevitably some businesses will be more innovative than others.   Learning takes time.  In a competitive market some will wake up too late.   But such is the speed of transformation that innovative businesses and government agencies now need customers, citizens, suppliers, and support services to be fully up to speed.

We have been here many times before.   Once telephones were a luxury option.   EDI in the 1980’s brought on the pains for small suppliers of large retailers and manufacturers.  Now it’s happening much faster and with much deeper impacts on businesses and individuals.

Like the campaign to tackle adult literacy we should rightly be concerned about sections of society who are left behind.  How annoying were those endless adverts for Freeview or for broadband when it wasn’t available in your area?  How puzzling it must be for those who have no idea about ‘finding more on our website’.   And how stupid is it that 97% of websites fail to meet the standards set down for disability access?

Within our own business communities the reality is that we spend nowhere near enough on training and making sure that all our people (seniors and juniors) can use this stuff.   As an industry we give nowhere near enough time and attention to making these things easy to use.  Subsidies to encourage broadband take-up fall short of explaining Web2.0 to SME’s.  Our business plans so easily overlook the ‘long tail’ costs of dealing with the disconnected.

The government’s own ‘Social Exclusion Unit’ has done a great job in identifying the scale of the challenge.  Thinking positively, the emphasis is shifting towards ‘inclusion through innovation’ and is reflected in the work of the ‘digiteam’ project (www.digiteam.org.uk) but businesses everywhere need to wake up to their own best interests. 

The recent CMA Focus Day on Mobility showed that flexible working is very high on many business agendas – particularly amongst larger enterprises.   In the office there’s always someone to help out but taking the lap-top home does two things.  Embarrassingly It can expose gaps in expertise but, more-positively, it can also enable the wider family to connect and to learn.  How many older employees turn to their children to sort out the email or the word processing when workmates are not conveniently to hand?

There’s no need to take a charitable stance.    Within our own business communities, if you care to look really closely, you’ll find the digital equivalent of those adult literacy issues.   And if your own people cannot use this stuff effectively, the chances are that your customers, suppliers and correspondents are also lost and confused.

Time now for enterprises to learn from this Ofcom survey of older folk - time now to mind the gap.

i  ‘Older People and Communications Technology’ – 5^th July 2006  www.ofcomconsumerpanel.org.uk 

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'Mind the Gap' was first published in Communications News, July-August edition, 2006