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Managing Spatial Data Infrastructures in Developing Countries:
Concepts and Implications`
In more detail, one could describe these by a number of quality parameters, such as in Table 1 and Table 2:   From a transaction cost theory point of view, enhancing reliability by users is seen as a transaction cost, whereas enhancing reliability by providers is seen as an increase of maintenance cost. The optimum is at the point where the sum of the two is at its minimum, as can be seen in Fig. 1.  Figure: Cost of reliability of GDI More and more, we are moving to a society in which the management of information––through communications and computer networks––is becoming the key strategic resource that determines the competitiveness of nations and communities. Despite massive investments in information infrastructure, many believe that the full promise of the technological revolution remains unfulfilled––both in the realm of economic development, and in terms of social progress. And concludes that the key policy challenges of the knowledge-based economy include:
An environment that is however largely unreliable will not generate any economic activity, as unreliable supply will influence manufacturers’ decisions in respect of choice of business, location and input combination. Wherever possible, business activities that are highly (geo-)information intensive are avoided. The short-term response of private firms is than the intensive use of non-(geo-)information inputs. Bringing this further to the cost and cost efficiency questions, one could argue that the cost of infrastructures would than also include the cost of the reliability-enhancing and/or the cost of avoiding reliability-dependency strategies. This dependency between systems is highlighted by (Hunker, 2002), who notes that: Global or continental critical infrastructures –– including electric power, telecommunications, and the Internet –– are now the control plane for advanced economies. The occasional failures of these key infrastructures illustrate not only our dependence, but also the unanticipated interdependencies between systems. For example, the 1998 failure of a single telecommunications satellite, Galaxy 4, led to an outage of nearly 90% of all pagers in the United States, while also causing a number of unanticipated failures: many banking and financial services (credit card purchases, automated teller machines) were interrupted, as was communications with doctors and emergency workers. It relates the cost of providers to that of users if certain strategies from either side are implemented. It also shows that it is not enough to look only at the (static) user needs, but that one needs to take into account the users’ (dynamic) behaviour, or dynamic reaction to certain static or dynamic situations. In absolute terms one could summarize this as in Table 3.  Yet, refinement could be in the question whether cost is (too) high or low. These absolute terms assume only one item of spending, whereas in practice users would always address the question in relation to other spending items. It would thus be better to include a sense of relativity, for example through the issue of “affordability”. Affordable in this context would mean both possible and acceptable (although one could also make a more refined distinction, where one would include the option “acceptable” and “not acceptable”). Users can afford cost if it doesn’t exceed a certain percentage of their overall spending, or if somehow the cost may lead to a certain benefit. How affordability leads to certain users’ behaviour is described by (Cave and Vogelsang, 2003). They suggests that the strategies of potential new entrants to mobile telecom facilities strategies will be influenced by the level of access prices and on the degree of investment in infrastructure which entrants have to make to be eligible to purchase interconnection services at wholesale prices. |