Ladies and gentlemen,

It is a great pleasure for me to address this interesting and important Business-led Forum here in Riga.

My guess is that historians will look back on our times, the 40-year span between 1980 and 2020, and classify it among the handful of historical moments when humans reorganized their entire civilization around a new tool, a new idea.

These decades mark the transition from the Industrial Age, an era organized around the motor, to the Digital Age, an era defined by the the brains within today's computers, the microchip.

One hundred and fifty years ago an American painter named Samuel Morse was working on a portrait of General Lafayette in Washington. Suddenly his wife - who lived many kilometres away - grew ill and died.

But it took seven days for the news to reach him. In his grief and remorse, he began to wonder whether it was possible to overcome barriers of time and space, enabling people to connect in times of need. His solution was to use electricity to convey messages - and so he invented the telegraph. Emotion had led to innovation.

As you know, the Morse code existed as communication-system at sea until the end of the last century. The French stopped using the Morse code in 1997 with the words: "Calling all. This is our last cry before silence?"

But this didn't lead to silence. Every day. Every hour. Every minute. Every second we communicate. Innovations and new technology are changing our lives. No sector remains untouched. Not even politics.

One and a half year ago we experienced that the stock market almost reached the stages of Nirvana within the IT sector. Then, as we all know, someone had to learn that the basic rule of doing business also applies for dotcoms: You have to earn money! And since then it seems like everything went wrong. And dotcom is no more a shining brand for doing business.

There are people, and even politicians, which belive IT is just a hype. And on behalf of the Norwegian Government I will make a statement about the IT revolution: This is the end – of the beginning. The real IT revolution starts now! Beyond the hype there is hope…

The world will change dramatically. The Internet and globalisation are changing both our society and our perception of reality. Society's cornerstones – the institutions themselves – are under pressure. If Norway is to keep up, we have no time to waste. The world is not going to wait for us. We have to learn to live with change. The task of politicians will therefore be not to resist changes, but to help people and businesses through them.

Poitical processes, particularly development of new legislation and regulations take time, often too long time for a fast moving sector like the IT sector. Therefore we are developing co-regulation. By the time new regulations are implemented, sometimes the market has moved one step further. We therefore have to create a system where market players develop new technological standards and then the government implement the new standards.

As an answer to this and the eEurope initiative, we have launched the eNorway action plan. The Government's objective with the eNorway plan is to influence and accelerate the development of a knowledge society. By employing the new technology we want to make use of the whole country and its entire population in order to increase our value creation and safeguard our welfare level.

The eNorway plan is a process document, and it is important to get started immediately. The Government cannot develop an IT policy alone. That is why we are inviting industry and organisations to co-operate with us, to identify new measures and to take part in the implementation of the plan.

eNorway is an operative plan that describes where we are, what has to be done, who is responsible and when the actions are to be implemented. It is to be revised every six months, and in June this year we released eNorway version 3.0. In December version 4.0 will be released.

As the Government's eCoordinator I’m reporting to the Norwegian Prime Minister every month.

Joint effort – dugnad

We have a word in Norwegian – " dugnad" – which is very hard to translate into English. Probably the best translation is joint effort. (rooted in Norwegian tradition, people in a local area joining in, cleaning up in the garden, refurbishing, invite friends over, have to offer a beer…)

The basic idea behind the eNorway initiative is to challenge and inspire the different players to be active and take initiatives in their respective fields. IT is no longer an exercise for the chosen few, but has become a challenge across all sectors.

High degree of involvement from all ministries

Rooted in the Government through a separate state secretary committee

16 organisations, municipalities and government bodies are included as " eNorway partners".

Electronic signatures are an important factor in enabling electronic commerce and electronic government services. The government has taken measures to promote the use of electronic signatures and these measures are twofold: In the area of legislation, and in the area of policy development and pilot implementations.

A law on electronic signatures was passed by the Parliament in December last year. The law prescribes admissibility of electronic signatures as evidence and it defines requirements for certain electronic signatures ("qualified signatures"). Such signatures should be regarded as equivalent to hand-written signatures, provided that relevant legislation allows for electronic communication.

In order to remove obstacles to electronic commerce, a survey of all regulations and laws has been carried out. As a result of this survey the Government has recently proposed changing 39 laws.

The revised regulations and laws allowing electronic communication should be put into force by January 1, 2002. In other words, we are now implementing EU directives regulating the e-business, and so far the processes have worked out very well.

Earlier this year a government-appointed committee delivered a white paper on the government policy for use of digital signatures and Public Key Infrastructure in electronic communications with and within the Government. The paper calls for a co-ordinated effort to introduce use of digital signatures on a large scale when conducting business with and within the government.

New technology is breaking barriers and today’s young people already feature among the most important players in these developments. The SMS generation are tomorrow’s creators of value. We therefore need to listen to and learn from them.

The young generation is the most communicative generation ever, and being available irrespective of time or place, is something they take for granted.

For Norway with all our high mountains, our need for communication with our merchant fleet and oil platforms, deep fjords and a rather scattered population we always have had to communicate wireless. This has served to provide Norway with companies that are among leaders in the field of the wireless technologies. The Government wants to help to boost this development in partnership with the industry, and our aim is to provide Internet – anytime, anywhere you need it – for all, as the first country in the world.

In many ways we are sharing the dream of Pinnochio: To get rid of the wires.

Therefore we are now launching a government project in partnership with our wireless cluster of industries. The working title in my ministry is Project Pinnochio – sharing a wireless dream.

New technology brings about radical changes in the society. No sector is untouched. Today we cannot overview the technical possibilities of tomorrow. However, we have to grasp the opportunities the new technology provides. But, the technology is useless if it doesn’t make us a better future. A better life. New chances. Justice – and prosperity for the many – not the few.

Thank you for your attention.