Rufat Gulmammadov – Associate Professor, Department of Information Economics and Technologies, Azerbaijan State Economic University.
Address: 6, Istiqlaliyyat str., Baku, Azerbaijan.
E-mail: gulmamedovrg@rambler.ru

As evident from the international experience, there is a direct relation between the level of computerization and the economic growth in the regions. However, high rates of investment and the computerization alone do not guarantee the speedup of economic growth. This article concludes, that in comparison with the costs of hard- and soft-ware, the expenses for the cognitive analysis usually do not exceed even a half a percentage point of the regional computerization budget, while the losses due to the lack of such analysis will be much higher.

The study’s objective is to develop a method of regional computerization cognitive maps, designed to improve efficiency of the regional IT development planning. The basis of the developed map is a structural model of economic growth, suggested by the EIU (Economist Intelligence Unit) analysts, at the commission of Microsoft. The model establishes a conceptual dependence of the economic growth on a number of key and up-to-date computerization problems. For taking these features into the account there was developed a cognitive map of a special type, focused on the regional objectives and based on the production rules (Rule-Based Cognitive Map - RBCM). The rule base of a production network describes an entire set of cross-factor relations, defined by the EIU-model. The cause-and-effect relations characterizing the strength and the sign of the factor-on-factor influence are defined by a linguistic scale.

As a result, based on RBCM, an active prototype of the regional computerization cognitive model has been developed. The prototype tests showed that the model does not produce trivial or absurd results, but allows to formulate non-obvious alternative strategies, which tended to be better than those proposed by managers of the regional computerization. The main advantage of the model is the fact, that it allows to do the divergent analysis of alternative projects, which is very useful at the early, but the most complex and important stage, which is the stage of conceptual synthesis of the regional projects.