Switzerland is the 3rd most networked economy in the world according to Global Information Technology Report distributed by the World Economic Forum. In Switzerland, Swisscom remains the leading telecom provider of local and international voice services and data services. It provides nearly 4 million access lines in Switzerland, including 1 million ISDN channels, and has 4.6 million mobile phone subscribers. Swisscom’s Fixnet subsidiary provides leased lines and data transport to residential and business customers. The Swiss government owns approximately two-thirds of the company. ICT Employment Opportunities. Stage (4) The country divides into 26 cantons, which is subdivision of the country. Each canton has its own preferred language, mainly German. Some of the cantons are bilingual in French and German; however, 15 percent of the country’s workforce is currently choosing to speak English. IT job opportunities in Switzerland's workforce are growing with high demand that are mainly in the financial, insurance, and chemical sectors as well as entrepreneurship for cafes in the big cities, portals in internet, and venture lab. IT graduates of local universities and schools’ are not meeting the high demand of IT field jobs in terms of numbers and specialty skills. This makes Switzerland the world’s ideal place to work in the IT field due to it's high salary offers. Most of the IT jobs in-demand are in big cities such as Bern, Zurich, and Geneva. A high amount of highly skilled foreign IT professionals are interested in these positions but strict work authorization laws in Switzerland make obtaining these jobs extremely difficult. It is almost impossible for a person outside of the country to live and work in Switzerland unless a job offer was provided prior to arrival in the country. Business-to-Consumer (B2C) Electronic Commerce. Stage (3) B2C e-commerce in Switzerland is becoming stronger based on the highly developed internet infrastructure in many different sectors such as banking, online trading, e-marketing, airlines, online retailing, ticketing, and supermarket. To support B2C e-commerce development, the Swiss government built a multi-language website to support small and medium businesses called www.pme.admin.ch. In addition, the state owned Post Office service delivers content conveniently through an online service. Swiss bank, which is one of the biggest banking systems, is offering extensive online services to their customers free of supplementary charges through PayNet. Paynet is a subsidiary of Telekurs Swiss financial information group. The others banks are following their lead. According to the www.swissinfo.ch, average e-commerce growth over the past five years has been around 25 per cent, online shopping accounts four to five percent of the market share, yet ticket sales and online supermarket purchases account about fifty percent of the e-commerce market. The Swiss online supermarket sector is one of the biggest in Europe after Britain. Business-to-Business (B2B) Electronic Commerce. Stage (3) Business-to-business e-commerce continues to grow in Switzerland. Specific sectors are growing where companies have increased the use of electronic data interchange for order processing and fulfillment, invoicing, and payments. Steady digital growth currently assists in the growth of efficiency with business-to-business transactions. The availability of digital products and services throughout the world allow international transactions to occur seamlessly, as if the sale happened within Switzerland. At this time, regulations of e-commerce are not advanced for international trading. This slows the global growth for worldwide trading amongst all countries. Switzerland works together with a specific group of friendly countries as utilizes them as trading partners.
• United States
• Japan
• Columbia
• Saudi Arabia
• Gulf Cooperation Council
The green colored countries indicate the trading partners with Switzerland
E-Government (Stage 3)
In 2010, Waseda University World e-Government ranked Switzerland 20th out of 40 surveyed countries with a score of 67. Switzerland is ranked 11th of all European countries. This is the 1st year Switzerland was added to this survey. The ranking was deprived from several factors. These factors include management optimization, required interface-functioning applications, national portal, e-government promotion, introduction of CIO, network, and e-participation. Switzerland’s ranking is tied with Denmark’s for second place, only behind Sweden for their country’s network preparedness. Switzerland's high ranking in network preparedness played a major factor in their overall ranking. World e-Government Ranking by country 2010  E-Government of Switzerland has several main infrastructure components. The first component is network preparedness. This is the basic infrastructural foundation for the implementation of e-Government. Switzerland is ranked 3rd most networked economy in the world, according to Global Information Technology Report distributed by the World Economic Forum. Network portal is the second component, which utilizes a single interface to provide access to the entire information offering of the Confederation, cantons, and municipalities. The network portal allows specific groups of employees’ access to information that pertains to that group. All official transactions and services of the federal administration are linked to www.ch.ch. The portal provides access to approximately 3,700 websites in five different languages which include German, French, Italian, Rhaeto-Romansch, and English. Required interface-functioning application assures user-friendly and secure electronic services. Management optimization gauges each division of the government's computerization and ICT integration attainment, quantifying the government's efforts with these areas. The Government CIO is a key factor in the success of e-Government. The Chief Information Officer (CIO) for the government of Switzerland is Peter Fischer. As the CIO, Peter Fischer and the Federal IT Council are responsible for the overall strategy for all ICT used in the Federal Administration. They issue directives for ICT requirements, strategy, architecture and security. They also determine medium and long-term development directions for ICT in the Federal Administration. Switzerland’s residents have a national identification card. This card, which began it's roll out in May of 2010, is an electronic means to prove identity by legally binding electronic signature and also serves as a method of secure authentication. The electronic identification card is called SuisseID, and includes electronically encoded photo and fingerprints on a chip. The SuisseID is available in a USB key or as a smart card format. The SuisseID provides a secure means for conducting business online. The ID consists of three elements: Electronic proof of identification, qualified electronic signature, and transparency regarding business-relevant personal attributes. |
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Global IT Readiness : Country of Switzerland |
Overview |
Network Access |
Networked Learning |
Networked Society |
Networked Economy |
Networked Policy |
Offshore Oppurtunities |
Conclusion |
References |
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