The Naked Chief Blog

It was always going to be a tough assignment and a large part of me is disappointed that the job is only half-done. As of today, we have received over 1,250 views of the 13 policies outlined on the Naked Chief blog in the last few weeks.

The areas of biggest interest were certainly ICT Strategy support for small business, Assigning an economic value to a digitally connected life, and Introducing LAMP into the secondary education curriculum. So for any budding policy writers out there consider that some free research.

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? 

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. 

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.