STATE-ADOPTED DOCUMENTS NOT SATISFACTORY FOR ASSISTING WITH INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES INTRODUCTION

Noyan Tapan
Nov 01 2006

YEREVAN, NOVEMBER 1, NOYAN TAPAN. The results of a survey conducted
in 14 Armenian ministries (of foreign affairs, education and science,
finance and economy, and others), and big universities (the American
University of Armenia, Yerevan State University, and others) show that
the documents adopted by the state for introduction of information
technologies are not satisfactory. Tagui Tumanyan, of the Center for
Information Law and Policy (CILP), stated this on October 31 during
the two-day international conference "Open Source Software Policy
Importance for Information Society Development". According to her,
among such documents are the concept of IT industry development and
the strategy of e-document circulation introduction adopted by the
Armenian government, under which pilot programs are being implemented
in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Finance and Economy
and some other ministries. In these programs, open source software
packages (Linux, Open Office) are used in intradepartmental networks
with the assistance of donor organizations. The speaker noted that 71%
of the organizations surveyed said that they have no IT use policy,
which, in the words of T. Tumanyan, reflects the imperfection of the
state policy on IT use. According to 22% of those surveyed, they try to
develop such a policy for their organizations. Only 7% said that they
use a policy. 29% of surveyed said that 80% of software packages used
by them are licensed, another 29% said that 30% of the packages used
are licensed. 35% of the state governance and educational organizations
surveyed expressed their willingnes to use open source softaware, 29%
said that they are ready to do this, if Microsoft requires that its
licensed software packages be used. 7% said they do not trust open
source software in terms of safety, and 29% replied that they have
not yet decided whether to use open source softaware or not. T.
Tumanyan indicated the following common fact: the internal budgets
of those surveyed did not envisage money for refreshing their software.