China will launch a national enterprise informatization quotient (EIQ) -- an index to measure the application level of information technology (IT) among enterprises -- to promote IT applications in businesses, which will be used first as a key index for the ranking of the top 100 electronic companies made by the Ministry of Information Industry beginning next year.

"We are collecting opinions from governmental departments, experts and enterprises on the composition of indices we will adopt in the system, and the preliminary survey will soon start," said Jiang Qiping, deputy director of the National Informatization Evaluation Center, yesterday at a forum on the promotion of information in China.

He said the key indices will be set this year and surveys in some pilot enterprises will also be finished.

While the national organization is still studying the way to conduct EIQ such evaluations, local governments have begun to put it into practice on a trial basis.

Yu Xuelin, deputy director of the information working office of Tianjin Municipality, said her city had selected 20 enterprises to conduct a survey on the scale of IT applications in their operations and management.

The municipality will expand the survey to 300 to 500 manufacturing businesses next month and will eventually include all enterprises in the city.

"We hope our researches in Tianjin will provide some value to the establishment of the national EIQ system," Yu said.

She said Tianjin will soon set up an informatization research and evaluation center to lead the survey and promotion of IT applications in enterprises.

Enterprises also placed high hopes on the establishment of a national EIQ system.

"The release of EIQ will provide us a good source to judge the potential of our market," said Arthur Chang, managing director of US domain name registry provider VeriSign's Asia Pacific operations.

He said that the company had decided to continue to pour its sources into domain name registration and corporate e-mail systems in China, where more than 90 percent of enterprises do not have their own domain name, which is called a "trade mark on the Internet."

"Comparing the present some 600,000 domain names with China's 10 million plus enterprises, we can see the potential will be great," said Chang.

The NASDAQ-listed company has 20 partners in China to help develop its domain name registry.

(China Daily June 12, 2002)