During the week from Monday February 27^th till Friday March 3^rd 2017 BNR and MKB-Nederland are organizing debates about the results from the Ondernemerskieskompas. The four themes are: labour market, energy, taxes and digitalization.

Yesterday, the debate was about ‘Digitalization’, a topic which is high on the agenda for our members, and also one of the five themes for the CIO Platform Nederland.

Participating in the debate was Teun van der Vorm (CIO ANWB and member of CIO Platform Nederland), together with Ben van der Burg (IT-entrepreneur and BNR-columnist) and Lineke Sneller (professor ICT at Nyenrode). By using statements, they gave their message in the area of digitalization to the next cabinet.

The statements were:

1. People who lose their jobs because of technological developments must be retrained at the costs of their former employer.
2. Companies must be obligated to invest in cyber security.
3. Computer programming must be an obligatory subject at elementary school, even if this means there is less time for other subjects.

According to the participants of the discussion it goes too far to make retraining of employees and investing in cyber security obligatory. Employees have a responsibility of their own to invest in their own development and in the context of sustainable employability, you have to invest in your employees continuously as an employer, not solely with the arrival of robots, etc. Also companies already see the importance of digital security and are making investments in this area, also due to high fines in the area of privacy legislation. It is of their own interest for business continuity and reputation for companies to have their digital security in order. The participants do think making computer programming an obligatory subject in elementary school is a good way to stimulate digital development and logical thinking at a young age. It however goes beyond solely programming, it is about computional thinking, learning to find solutions for problems and skills in the area of collaboration.

Participants of the discussion all agreed on the fact that they miss ICT knowledge and vision in the current election campaigns. The IT component is part of all themes (healthcare, safety, education, etc.) and there must be more attention for this subject. That is also why the business has signed a digital manifest, with five necessary actions to be ahead as the Netherlands in the area of digitalization (more information).

You can listen to the debate (in Dutch) here: website BNR.