Since the 1980s, Korea has promoted policies that focused on fostering and the promotion of ICT as strategic means for national development: strategies for e-Korea, Broadband IT Korea, and u-Korea are just some examples. As the result, Korea came to establish a world-class information country with a highly acknowledged e-Government system in place and a world’s top-level broadband Internet subscription rate.

However, the spread of informatization into every sector of the society revealed issues and limitations of policies that were focused only on its promotion and positive effects. Many information systems were established in the central and local governments only to find difficulty in sharing information resources because of the lack of interoperability of data and systems. Adverse effects of informatization were aggravated as cyber violence including harmful information or malicious comment distribution and personal information leakage increased.

In order to root out such effects, the Korean government established a new vision and strategy for national informatization and is turning its policy directions accordingly.

It set as the vision of national informatization for the following five years ‘Establishing an Advanced Knowledge Information Society Based on Creativity and Trust’. Five goals and twenty agenda items back up the vision for its early achievement.

The five goals are: ‘creative soft-power’ to create knowledge in the society and reform its utilization framework; ‘cutting-edge infrastructure for digital convergence’ that suits the age of digital convergence; ‘trusted information society’ that is safe and mature; ‘efficient knowledge government’ that communicates and cooperates with the citizens; and ‘people prospering through digitalization’ by using the cutting-edge technology and services. Policy directions have also been changed from informatization that is ‘promotion-oriented’ to ‘utilization-oriented’; from informatization that is ‘seamed and dispersed’ to ‘seamless and converged’; from focusing on ‘positive effects’ to ‘adverse effects’; and from promoting ‘government-led policies’ to ‘people-Government collaborative governance