BRaIN a framework for public decision makers looking to understand and encourage broadband adoption. It’s a digital workspace for gathering broadband and community-specific intelligence. Within BRaIN communities can evaluate the progress and impact of their investment in public networks.

This 'broadband deployment' framework has three levels :

• The big picture: BRaIN Living Lab - stakeholders and local leaders working together. A broadband best practice and steering committee that takes a regional approach to monitoring and managing broadband investments and support activities, comprised of regional development stakeholders, digital economy researchers and political leaders focused on broadband, around a core execution team working together to understand the drivers, barriers and benefits of what broadband can bring to their region;

• The intelligence production: BRaIN Research Center – researchers and analysts (and document management specialists in support) turn data into insights, trustworthy, up-to-date, and statistically valid data and information (macro-, micro- and technical) to develop strong evidence-based and actionable intelligence for planning, monitoring and fine-tuning the implementation of broadband policies and initiatives. Researchers and analysts respond to questions from local stakeholders and politicians;

• The engine room: Broadband Lifecycle Toolkit - at the core of the framework, processes and tools to collect micro-level data (based on the set of SNG services) on utilization of broadband and e-solutions from individual businesses, organizations, and households in the region.

The big picture

We recommend the creation of a BRaIN Living Lab that is made up of key regional development stakeholders, local leaders and politicians working together to monitor and manage broadband investment and adoption activities. This steering committee takes a regional approach to planning and serving as a clearinghouse for broadband best practices. The purpose of the BRaIN Living Lab is to improve cost effectiveness of broadband investments and to increase utilization and benefits by businesses, organizations and households in the region.

The objective of the BRaIN Living Lab are to:

• Accelerate the time to value of broadband deployments and of sustainable use programs by enabling fast adoption of proven techniques;

• Reduce risk and increasing benefits by avoiding known mistakes and pitfalls;
  

• Decrease replication of effort by ensuring that all organizations have access to up-to-date knowledge;

• Enhance learning and knowledge transfer by providing resources to organizations, businesses, and practitioners, public and private, to increase their education and skills; and;

• Provide a platform for research and innovation to share the results of trials and studies and advance the industry.

The BRaIN Living Lab is built upon a “data gathering capability” (the BRaIN Research Center) and focuses on identification and promulgation of best practices for broadband deployments, operations, and productivity improvements across different sectors (education, health care, energy, government, media, and public safety, etc.). Of particular importance to the efficiency of the BRaIN Living Lab is the BRaIN Research Center work on developing and assessing performance/value metrics and on economic impact analysis (ROI) as these will form the basis for determining the best practices and for quantifying their value and benefits.

The intelligence production

The BRaIN Research Center is where researchers and analysts (and document management specialists in support) take data and turn it into insights, and also respond to questions from local stakeholders and politicians. Researchers and analysts who understand the local regional context and have trustworthy, up-to-date, and statistically valid data and information (macro-, micro- and technical) to develop strong evidence-based and actionable intelligence for planning, monitoring and fine-tuning the implementation of broadband policies and initiatives.

The BRaIN Research Center produces and/or collects the following data and information:

• Mapping on the availability of broadband infrastructure;

• Price and affordability and service quality;
  Adoption and use;

• Broadband performance indices which combine multiple and complex data items to provide simple, accessible, and useful benchmarks;

• Trend analysis and comparative studies to provide fact-based data and assessments;

• Reliability, robustness, and security information;

• Content information and on content sources;

• Users and use cases by sectors;

• Economic impact analysis; and

• Metadata and common terminology for the broadband industry.
  

The engine room

To remedy the problem of the inadequacy of the existing datasets for the purpose of measuring our future digital economy performance, the Broadband Lifecycle Toolkit is a state- or country-level micro-data collection and analysis body: an institutionalization of the e-solution benchmarking process in the given territory to generate ongoing, comparable data sets.

The Broadband Lifecycle Toolkit is built from SNG's Broadband Lifecycle Approach (BLA) and services. Its set of functionalities includes:

• Standardized set of questions and metrics: backbone on utilization of broadband and eSolutions at micro level;

• Recurring survey about utilization of broadband, adoption (with perceived and projected benefits);

• Findings and reports – the basis for accountability, transparency and the optimal functioning of the Center of excellence.

A risk management strategy for broadband investors

When a community embarks on a broadband deployment project, the elected officials who make the actual spending decisions are always going to be challenged by their taxpayers or their constituencies (and their opponents too) about the rationale for the broadband investment. For them – and for the community as a whole – BRaIN is also an evaluation framework.

In most public infrastructure projects, not enough attention is paid in the early stages to tracking and impact evaluation mechanisms - which increasingly often becomes an accountability problem later on for decision-makers.

BRaIN is a framework to turn this scenario on its head, to incorporate the evaluation components (and much more) early on in the “broadband process” – in a way that decision makers and stakeholders can feel comfortable with. BRaIN is strategy to actively monitor (hence manage) a community’s broadband deployment and adoption risk.

To use a football analogy: a coach should know where he needs to change what his players are doing, so that at half time he can adjust his game plan.

Next: Approach