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.

But apart from the odd comment and a lot of retweets, the experiment has shown that meaningful ICT policy is either 1) hard to articulate, 2) of little interest to the industry, or 3) much simpler than we have tried to paint it to be. For that reason we have decided to park the 30 Blogs in 30 Days campaign.

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? 

There is currently much economic research done on the use and application of ICT for productivity gains yet there is little support for educating the SME market in ways to plan, incorporate and purchase ICT within the particular requirements of their own business. Even the annual reports and studies to members from peak bodies such as the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ACCI) which represents over 350,000 companies, largely ignore the blueprint for ICT. Neither the AIIA nor ACS, nor CA nor CPA are national industry association members of ACCI whereas most other industries are represented. Instead, the value of ICT is communicated to SMEs through a steady national conference or training agenda from unrelated and removed generic training companies. But there are only so many seminars that a person working 80+ hours a week wants to, or can attend. And clearly even less time to implement solid solutions. Ultimately an ICT planning skill would prove infinitely more valuable. 

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?

Secondly and perhaps more tangibly in terms of how the business of ICT is governed (in the little "g" context) is an issue that continually goes unchecked by everyone from industry associations all the way to Federal government. R&D centre closures.  

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. 

Late last week Lawrence Springborg made his statement about a 3% saving across government to funnel more into front-line services. Unfortunately the cuts he indicated will potentially include technology amounting to a $40 million annual reduction for the local, national, and international industry suppliers that service Queensland Government. Somewhere along the line someone forgot that “front-line” services today are almost entirely underpinned by technology.

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.