...From an economic perspective, IT and related industries are valuable because they pay well; as of 2007, about 16,550 Rhode Islanders worked at IT and digital media firms, the EDC says, and their wages averaged more than $70,000 — twice the state's median wage.

Those figures don't include freelance and contract workers, a hard-to-quantify part of this economic sector, or the IT workers at banks, colleges, hospitals, and in other non-IT firms. Yet even if you doubled the EDC figure, it's small for a work force of more than 570,000...

...In some ways, these firms currently make the biggest impact on Rhode Island's broader economy, because they can help clients streamline operations, improve efficiency, become more mobile and limber, and even reduce technology costs by better targeting their spending.

 

Full Story: Can the geeks save Rhode Island? Source: The Phoenix, February 4th, 2009 Author: Marion Davis Added on February 5th, 2009 at 11:02 am, by Matt Mikula