Ini adalah tulisan lain, yang juga dipergunakan untuk mengajukan beasiswa ke Korea 
Life’s challenges are not supposed to paralyze you, they’re supposed to help you discover who you are
Bernice Johnson Reagon
The Three Challenges Adopting ICT in Republic of Indonesia
By Panji Gautama Asmawarman (Gadjah Mada University)
ICT that stands for Information and Communication Technology, has a lot of potential in supporting every aspect in our life, that makes it so important that its presence is inevitable. An ability to adopt ICT should be a key to improve efficiency and effectiveness of performance of the services that government hold. The Government have an important rule, government must become a motivator, regulator, and facilitator in carry on ICT. Information and Communication sector contributed 15% of the Indonesian Gross Domestic Product and this trend continues to increase. ICT nows become a driving tools of the Indonesian development and also a tools that contribute for a foreign exchange.
The first challenges that must be faced by Republic Indonesia is a digital gap that happens in every area in the country. The country has 33 provinces, but not all of the province have the same level in ICT facilities and human resources readiness in using ICT in their daily life. This gap causes inhibition for Universal Service Obligation (USO), one of the electronic government product, an integrated services that provide a quick and easy works can only be enjoyed by a several big cities, while for the other areas are still paper-based which is not effective and takes a lot of time on the process.
The research results of the Economist Intelligence Unit (ECU) indicates that the weak point in improving Indonesia’s competitiveness in the IT field is a weak infrastructure, which is become the second challenges. The current implementation of ICT infrastructure in each area depends on national budget, the funding amount for each areas was not evenly, this also causes the digital gap that has been mentioned previously. The funding for ICT infrastructure should not only depend on national budget, funding can be obtained from the rate of ICT service providers such as ISP’s or cellular operators with a regulation that has been set up by the government. Thus, funds can be fulfilled without taking part of the funds for the other sectors, or maybe the funds that has been established for IT sector can be shared to crucial sector that need to get the full attention like health or society. With a good IT infrastructure, the information access needs can be met and be evenly distributed to all areas.
The last challenges is the lacking readiness of human resources to use the facility which has been provide by Indonesian government. The Government have been provide an IT facilities at several govenment offices, but due the lack of human resources readiness, the facilities cannot optimally used. Humas resources readiness has been anticipated by conducting training and workshops to the several government offces. But this was not an effetive way while the facilities still cannot effectively used. The current government, especially the local government has not dared to spend a special budget to hire proffessional IT to manage facilities, the local government prefer to use their own personnel, which have no background in IT to maintain and employ the facilities.
