Stephen Timms MP

E-Commerce Awards

So let me express thanks to Interforum, our hosts this evening and joint sponsors for all their hard work. My thanks to the National Sponsors, Cisco not least for the use of their call centre and The Royal Bank of Scotland for advertising the awards on their bank statements. Thanks also to the Media Sponsor, the Sunday Times Enterprise Network, who have provided great coverage this year. Its right also to thank all the regional sponsors, the regional advisor network and the e-business champions. Thanks too, to the staff at UK Online for business and, of course, to everybody for entering.

The evolution of the Awards reflects how businesses have development their approach to ICT and become more sophisticated users. The challenge is to help many more businesses and especially small organisations understand the benefits of exploiting ICT. ICT has to be integrated throughout the organisation and throughout the supply chain.

That offers a better return on investment. But it also poses new challenges. It means a business not only identifying its technological needs, but addressing also business processes, people, organization, culture. Focusing just on the technology reduces the benefits. But doing it right, e-business can increase productivity, enhance competitiveness and stimulate innovation.

And that is why it is so important. As a nation, we have for a long time lagged behind on productivity, and doing something about that is top of DTI's agenda. Earlier this year, a report by London Economics, commissioned by Cisco found that in the ten years up to 2002, ICT investment has made both an important contribution to output growth in the UK - 25% of total output growth - and a sizeable contribution to labour productivity growth. The British Chambers of Commerce also carried out a productivity survey in March, showing ICT investment as the most important factor in improving businesses performance over the past five years.

Clearly, if we are to improve overall, we need to be more effective in our take up and use of ICT. So, how well are we doing on that measure in comparison with our international competitors?

A report produced for last's year's E-Summit showed that the UK had the second best environment in the world for e-commerce in 2002, behind the USA. The 2003 report on e-readiness by the Economist Intelligence Unit, ranked the UK third in the world, level with the USA. And this year's DTI International Benchmarking Study, to be published shortly, will show UK businesses making more sophisticated use of ICT than ever before. We are moving in the right direction, but there is a clear message that the world leading position we want requires us to work harder on improving our use of ICT.

The Benchmarking Study will also identify a continued decline in some of the more basic connectivity uses of ICT amongst small businesses. We still need to convince many that ICT can really help in how they operate and in their communications with suppliers and customers - and that is why the example that all of you have set is so important to us. Seeing you succeed is far more powerful among your peers than any number of speeches from people like me.

One of the ways of encouraging smaller businesses to use ICT is to ensure they have confidence in the quality of advice they get from business advisers. I therefore welcome the introduction of an award this year for exploiting the advice from a Technology Means Business accredited ICT adviser. I would encourage the ICT supply industry to collaborate to complement the assurance provided by programmes like TMB. The industry needs to provide SMEs with a means of assuring that the solutions are right, and to build confidence in using them effectively.

I am also delighted that for the first time this year there is a new category of awards for National Innovation. These recognise the innovative and sustained use of technology to improve the business through mobile and wireless technology and through broadband. We want these technologies to open up the possibility of new ways of doing business, and new products and services.

Since the awards last year we have made great progress on communications, and I want small firms to enjoy the benefits. Jointly with Italy we have gained the first 3G mobile service in Europe. My Italian counterpart told me the other day that there are now more mobile phone subscribers in Italy than there are people. We are not quite in that position, but we aren't far off.

The driver for that success has been competition, and we want the same dynamic at work now with broadband. The number of broadband connections has more than doubled in the past year, to two and a half million - which means we have overtaken France to become the second biggest broadband network in Europe. Germany still has by some margin the biggest, but the gap between them and us has halved in the past year, so we are closing very fast. And I expect dramatic growth in wireless-based broadband services over the next few months.

We will have in place by next month in each region of England arrangements to bring together the broadband demand from education and the health service, to take the aggregated demand to the market and so to change fundamentally the business case for broadband in rural areas. And we have given the new converged regulator Ofcom the brief of developing our competitive market environment for communications.

We are working to improve the delivery of public services and achieve long term cost savings by joining up online government services around the needs of their customers, ensuring not just that all government services are available electronically by 2005, but that key services also achieve high levels of use.

The use of ICT needs to be pervasive throughout UK businesses. I am pleased to be able to announce this evening that the Department will be supporting the awards again next year, and I look forward to another successful collaboration with all the sponsors to improve still further on this year's magnificent crop of entries.

Let me finish by thanking all those who have entered and by congratulating everybody who is here. Keep up all the great work in applying e-commerce in your organization, and whatever happens tonight, every good wish for the year ahead. Thank you all very much.