ANALYSIS, Melbourne, Australia — We have to look at technology as something to utilize for a practical outcome.

Australia needs new ICT policies.

Why we don’t have an ICT Export industry!

According to the AIIA, domestic production of ICT is worth between 4 and 5% of GDP.

ICT exports were once around $7.8 billion per annum, in 2000, according to AIIA.

Now, under Howard, these have declined to $5.4 Billion according to Austrade.

There’s no reason we cannot more than double ICT exports in 5-10 years through government policy.

Canada is a country closes to Australia in size and population.

A single city in Canada, exports along $6.2 Billion Canadian (around 6.4 Billion in todays dollars), according to the Toronto City government.

1 city in Canada exports more IT than Australia!

Surely Australia with a population 450% greater than Toronto can double one city’s exports?!

Canada is also ahead of us in broadband and ICT infrastructure, despite our recent resources boom. Howard does nothing about ICT policy, and doesn’t even like IT.

I believe we can have a $13 Billion per annum ICT Export industry by 2015.

But it will need innovation. It will need ideas from overseas. it will need education.

It’s not that hard with the right leadership.

That is a huge opportunity, and a shelter against any forthcoming recession. A back-up plan to the resource boom. And ICT can be grown through utilization strategies without inflationary pressures on the economy, by government policy that aids global ICT exports.

It would be the start of making us part of an Education Nation, instead of a nation looking to the 1950s, under Howard.

This export of ICT market would position Australia positively overseas as a ‘clever country’ an oft-derided term.

But we can’t take this opportunity by looking inward and more of the same politics of paper-shuffling.

We don’t need the recidivist Howard government deciding ICT policy.

We should form closer partnerships with the USA, Germany and East Europe. In a global world an idea does not always recognize where it is born.

Australian governments should source the best ICT instead of massive roll-outs that damage the industry like the Customs disaster, designed by people who did not understand ICT.

What does the Howard government do? Besides mountains of paper and talk?

The Howard Government: Australian Technology Problem

We should look outwards. Do we?

We should look beyond hardware and ‘box’ thinking. Do we?

We’ve had 12 years of Howard: a supposedly pro-market government? Where’s our broadband? Now?!

The Good news

Australia is a global leader in Mining Software and other niches. Internet technologies have originated here. Software rollouts sometimes start here before going global.

But no thanks to the Howard Government.

Sure the US Free Trade Agreement on the whole is positive for ICT. Exchange of professionals, closer trade ties.

Austrade have done good work, but ICT is down the bottom of their website, 12th link, after many less relevant export industries. It’s symbolic, but…
And where’s the ICT initiatives?

If Rudd gets elected (as I predicted here) we will have decent broadband, according to the pre-election announcements. I have hope.

The Howard Government, is more interested in creating mountains of paper. This is seemingly backed up by our professional body the Australian Computer Society.

The ICT industry needs global innovation, not a bunch of aging professors and baby boomer consultants inflicting outdated curricula teaching outmoded computer ‘programming’ on kids, because that’s all they know.

The future is far more exciting than that.

Technology is so obviously a young person’s field!

If you ask ICT practitioners about what they do in their job, it will bear no resemblance to the actual curricula in most Australian universities.

At an ACS IT Symposium in August 2006 designed to ‘bridge the gap’ the very same professors ridiculed any idea that did not fit their ‘narrow’ view of the world.

I chaired a group of professors and they couldn’t agree amongst themselves on the ‘wording’ let alone any new ideas. Any new ideas were ‘revised out’.
ICT is one industry where age & history is a poor guide, unlike economics.

The Brain Drought in Australian ICT

Yet their is a dirth of people in ICT who understand emerging and even established technologies. Silicon Valley is far ahead. So is Toronto! There is a brain drought.

Instead we have policies driven and advised by ICT people out of touch with the market, a hallmark of Howard’s comfort with people in ICT his own age band.

Whether this is university professors who can’t understand modern ICT or baby boomer consultants who are intensely disliked by many of their younger members. Or aging Telstra executives.

It’s not good enough! Australia deserves better and can be a world ICT power!

Most of these organizations are full of people from the time when computers were a box in a room worked by scientists, and the concept of collaboration was having a meeting.

These people do not even efficiently use the technology they make policy decisions on.

Nor are they in touch with how to recruit Generation Y employees.

What we need is to understand technology, and use it

In a virtual world we need people who understand how to employ technologies like Web 2.0, citizen media, social bookmarking, online career management, agile computing, wikis, collaboration and even conversation in a digital age.

People who can foresee the future beyond a myopic backward-looking nostalgia for the past.

Notice I say employ or utilize, not ‘build’. The same people who harness these systems do not have to be the same people who ‘repair’ them. Do the technicians plan which models of car are released, or is that a broader decision taken in consultation, but with leadership?

An a recent Web 2.0 presentation the content was technical, inadequate and a sneering look down your nose at technology which the Americans are already utilizing.

The Americans (of all ages) say how can we utilize this technology?

Even when approached politely this arguing class is notoriously ‘dug-in’ in ICT. They say what can’t be done not how can we use this for the nation?

What Australia Needs under Rudd

It’s time they moved on and gave the younger (30-40) generation a chance at some real leadership. And innovation.

We need to become a global ICT industry, and we need government policy and policy advisers to reflect that.

We need vision, and leadership.

We don’t need ‘out-of-touch’ old professors and politicians who refuse to allow new talent into the echelons of government in ICT policy.

It’s time for generational change and a global world-view on ICT.

The world clock starts now…

Christopher