개도국의 식민피지배 경험에 기반한 해외 전자정부 구축시장 분석: 한국 IT 산업의 국제화 전략에 대한 시사점

As the global competitiveness of the Korean IT industry has already been well recognized, the overseas market for e-government development is becoming an enormous source of growth. In line with the basic guidelines for global strategies in general, balancing customization to tailor to each country and standardization to achieve scale economies should be considered in penetrating overseas e-government development markets. This exploratory study attempts to offer the foundation for an effective strategic approach by analyzing and segmenting LDCs (less-developed countries) with growth potentials for e-government development contracts based on their historical background. Based on the previous literature in the fields of history and anthropology, we surmise that each LDC's experience under a colonial government affected the levels of e-government components in three dimensions, i.e., supply, demand, and policy. It is largely because the recent e-government development being promoted by each country is ultimately the process of changing organizations and operations of each country's public administrative system. We identify three types of factors (ruling pattern, physical factors, and socio-cultural factors) that determine the features of colonial experience, and conduct regression analyses to examine the possible association between each factor and e-government development in LDCs with colonial experience. The results of the empirical analyses on 117 LDCs show that ruling pattern factor has significant influence on information supply and demand components. The population discrepancy between ruling and ruled countries is associated with information supply and policy components, while the distance between two countries with information demand component. Socio-cultural factors do not show any significant relation at all. Leveraging such results, countries covered by this study are divided into 4 clusters to provide implications to the choice of standardization and localization for the Korean IT industry’s global expansion. The same 117 LDCs were also regrouped into 4 segments in accordance with the levels of their e-government components. We suggest that, considering the similarity with Korea's e-government status and the proximity in terms of geography and culture, Korean IT service providers and government agencies needs to adopt an phased approach by entering Asian countries with colonial experiences under France or Russia with highest priority, and in turn, expanding towards LDCs in other segments.