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. 

Equitable industry-based funding in government budgets has always been a contentious issue. Close to the top of the industry winners are always mining, agriculture, and manufacturing. And much of the budget funding that goes to support these industries is significant investments in ports, rail and harbour-facilities to enable the import and export of primary and secondary industry ouputs. These facilities are infrastructure beacons that can be irrevocably linked to their industry. They provide an unmistakeable sense of importance, significance and tactile and tangible measurements: job creation, physical exports, investment attraction, and international gateways.

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.

First a few facts. 80% of Australian SMEs do not have an ICT strategy and most buy their technology from the retail channel on an ad-hoc basis.

Taking 1-man operations out of the equation, Australia has about 700,000 small business operators.In fact, the vast majority of  Australian companies are SMEs.  As such, much work is done in Australia by governments in support of the small business operator. On the flip-side however, 81% of the ICT market by spend is accounted for by the top 13,000 companies. It seems that the strategic thinking stops there as well. This policy initiative asks what kind of a powerful return would strategic ICT planning support at the SME level provide to the Australian economy? 

For a relatively small, but highly successful country on the global stage our national leaders take an overly complex and often ambivalent view towards the role and potential of information and communications technology. They do so because in many ways the government perceives that it is immune from any action the ICT industry takes. But we strongly believe that this is not the case and that debate on ICT policy should not be confined to the few weeks our policy makers spend on the hustings.

Beginning on 1st June the Naked Chief will be writing 30 blogs in 30 days addressing the topic of ICT policy and we'd like you to join the debate by adding your comments, queries and criticisms to the ideas we will throw-up throughout the month.