Several months ago I wrote about the Tau Index, a measure I created to find the countries who are the most aggressive in deploying IT. My idea was to aggregate certain measurements to level the playing field - it's easy enough to find the countries with the world's largest IT budgets, but tougher to find which are being the most aggressive with respect to the size of their population and economy.

Bangladesh emerged at the top of the heap, followed by several countries in Asia, Northern Africa, and Eastern Europe. This was no surprise, for it is these regions that are the most dynamic economically today, while the world's major powers continue to tread water.

See It at Cloud Expo West!
But the Tau Index is a rough measure, and I've been working to refine it. I plan to announce all-new results at an Enterprise 2.0 event in Manila November 3, then at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley in Santa Clara CA the following week.

Add Cloud Computing to the Mix
The key facet of the new report will be to track how Cloud Computing is being deployed. My original report covered 80+ countries, and I was able to discern a Top 25 from that group. I don't expect to be able to include as many countries with the new data set; for now I am concentrating on the few countries that made my Top 25 and are also among the so-called "Next Eleven" (N-11) countries. The Philippines, where I've been on a long-term visit, is in that group, as are other Southeast Asian nations.

How should I track Cloud Computing? My idea is to assign a value of between 1 and 4 to perhaps 20 specific aspects of the Cloud, multiply those values by the percentage of people who use them, then season an overall Cloud Computing Factor into the original recipe. For example, the use of gmail and similar Cloudmail would have a value of 1. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. would carry a value of 2, Salesforce and VMWare a value of 3, AWS a value of 4.

The idea is that a high percentage of SaaS or IaaS in a country would carry more weight than simply having a lot of people on Yahoo Mail or Twitter.

That's the rough outline. I have all the details in at least three places in my office.

Please tweet me or email me with your input. In particular, I'm surveying people to determine the optimal weighting of all the Cloud Computing factors, and also to determine how heavily to weigh Cloud Computing overall.

The world is looking into the mirror at a very scary economic picture today. Can we cut through all the partisan-based fingerpointing and realize that increasing productivity has always been the key to economic growth. To me, there is nothing more potentially productive to the global economy than Cloud Computing.

http://www.twitter.com/strukhoff