Content analysis of ICT documents in order to deduce the policies of the Seventh Development Plan (approvals from 1998 to 2017)

Five- year national development plans have a key role in achieving the goals of the vision document. There are two categories for development plan writing policies: diffusion-oriented and mission-oriented. So, prioritization in using an effective combination of the them is necessary. The purpose of this study is to determine the gap of upstream documents and propose policies to develop the seventh plan of ICT-sector. This research is descriptive-analytical in nature and it uses content analysis and documentary review. The population of resaerch are 67 meta-documents that have been selected as a purposeful and accessible sample for study. Analytical-descriptive method has been used to interpret and analyze the data. Based on the research findings, main policies were examined with a two-dimensional framework: 1) technological issues, which used the OECD classification, and 2) functional innovations, which presented in the 7-scale Hekkert classification. Then, the xial coding of each category was done in three levels of government, legislative and executive, and finally, based on the SWOT analysis of existing documents and its compliance with the claimed performance, principles were presented to develop the seventh ICT development plan. Accordingly, the program will have the necessary credibility if the central policies and principles proposed in the Seventh Development Plan of the ICT Sector will be valid.