The Naked Chief Blog

The World Computer Congress (WCC), in one year's time, will provide a boost in the arm for the Australian and near-shore ICT market. Last week I was asked to fill the position of Deputy Chairman, International Program Committee, which yesterday I accepted.

The role includes responsibility for coordinating the right commercial content into the right streams of the conference to marry the objectives of the academic content provided through the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP).  In short, oversight into making the congress content relevant for the marketplace. 

Today's policy asks whether a constitutional change to recognise and define multi-jurisdictional projects that represent the national ICT interest is achievable. So let me start this conversation by saying that the fear of God does not exist in modern commerce and for that reason the ICT industry is often treated with a mix of both awe and contempt. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is the classic case study in ethical dilema that drives a lot of what goes on in our industry today.

The economic value of a human life is often used in public policy decision making. It is regularly used to determine the viability of mega-infrastructure projects such as highway upgrades through notorious black-spots, or tunnels to fight traffic congestion. That is, if a particular stretch of the Pacific Highway is regularly responsible (or the site of) multiple fatalities in a given year then it is a relatively straight forward calculation to determine the payback period. This would be estimated based on an economic value of Joe Citizen calculated as a formula involving life expectancy, earning capacity, net present values, discount rates, and various other economic instruments. The basic point is that human life is captialised in a trade-off against infrastructure cost.

Over the last few years we've made a few statements about the requirement for ICT to make it onto the national agenda as a foreign policy issue. Two clear areas stand-out worth exploring.

Firstly,  as the world becomes increasingly digital the source code of the major software used to enable the world will become the new fossil fuel. It will become as precious a resource as oil and consideration should be given by today's governments as to how national investments are made in the infrastructure to support this "natural resource". They will happily build a coal port or terminal to prop up exports but what about building campuses  to support the evolution of application development lanaguages, whether it be .NET or Java (increasingly manageable should IBM buy Sun), or should investments be made in a national flavour and brand of emerging open source languages?

Imagine coming to work tomorrow in a world without technology? Back in November Sam asked that very question in a Longview article  entitled, What the ICT industry needs is a great campaign. The article was widely distributed and read within Queensland’s key ICT industry groups. And in an Australian first, today’s Courier Mail ran a single page advertisement drawing a line in the sand for Australia’s political parties to meet them head-on under the attention grabbing headline "We already employee 70,000 Queenslanders and with your help we could create another 30,000 new jobs".

In an election campaign that has safely ignored the technology vote to-date, key industry groups including Software Queensland, AIIA, ITCRA, ASIBA, ACS, WIT, IT Gold Coast, and under-signed by the ICT Industry Working Group Executive Officer Dr Paul Campbell, are now demanding the attention of the incumbent Premier and Opposition Leader Lawrence Springborg.