The Naked Chief Blog

Brisbane, Australia: May 22, 2009: Brisbane based IT research firm, Longhaus, has secured the commercialisation rights to selected Queensland Government technology information, the Minister for Public Works and Information and Communication Technology, Robert Schwarten announced today.  In a first for Australia, the Queensland Government will inform industry of its current and potential technology spending through a range of information products offered by Longhaus. 

At approximately $24 Billion per annum, the Queensland ICT market accounts for almost 25% of Australia's total annual ICT expenditure. Within this market the Queensland Government is the single largest ICT purchaser.
In support of this regional ICT powerhouse, Department of Public Works Director-General and Queensland Government Chief Information Officer Mal Grierson this week signed a 5 year agreement for the commercialisation of data relating to the government's ICT footprint with information regularly collected from across Queensland's budget-funded agencies. Known as the Longhaus Baseline, this new service will bring an endorsed and unprecedented level of insight into both the spending and composition of Queensland Government ICT. 

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. 

2020 Visions are the politician’s strategic equivalent of what Green ICT marketing is for technology vendors at the moment. They are everywhere. The trouble for the intended audience is trying to find the differences between visions and hallucinations, or even policy and strategy. But who can blame the politicians? As a concept, “tomorrow” is a great theme to use when setting agendas. It is most often an exciting prospect. But as well as it being an exciting prospect it can also conjure frightening ghosts of Christmas future as Ebenezer Scrooge first discovered in 1843 when Dicken’s published A Christmas Carol.

So with the Queensland Premier unveiling her Toward Q2 vision for Queensland I first re-read the editorial I wrote back in April comparing Prime Minister Rudd’s 2020 Vision to the Malaysian Prime Minister’s 2020 Vision of 1991. A quick synopsis went something like “immediate unification of non-integrated and competing national strategies and bodies is required should the Rudd government have any hope of handing down a meaningful 2020 Strategic Framework by the end of 2008.”

Back then I found the “tomorrowness” of the Rudd plan wanting. And recalling Dicken's, I love the description of the ghost of Christmas Future on Wikipedia as an analogy for fluffy vision statements: “…it appeared to Scrooge as a figure entirely muffled in a black hooded robe, except for a single gaunt hand with which it pointed.” The future is that way!

Given the development approach of the Bligh strategy is similar in virtually every respect to Rudd’s strategic framework (i.e. publish key themes, then invite community consultation, then develop and enact policies at a later undisclosed date), I approached the 44 page document with trepidation.

At the annual Queensland Premier’s AIIA Luncheon in Brisbane yesterday Premier Anna Bligh discussed how the State had just completed its submission to the Broadband Advisory Committee in Canberra. Her announcement was that the Queensland Government would dip into its annual ~$180million telecommunications spend (across all government departments and agencies) to fund the missing connections to 2% of the Queensland population in the fibre-to-the-node national broadband network.

While there were conditions, and while ensuring connections for Queensland’s share of that national 2% deficit may seem trivial in "the grand scheme" (approximately 85,000 people), it was a statement reminiscent of a state still brooding and reawakening from past injustices dolled out by the Federal government.