National Press Club

IM Forum

I first met Tom three years ago at a government sponsored forum at the Canberra theatre on how cd-rom would make us all multi-millionaires within 12 months. Ho hum. When I first saw Tom it struck me that I was looking at a really inquisitive elf. He's the bloke who would have had a huge Mechano set as a kid. Since then I've followed his progress with considerable interest. Tom was the first person to send pictures from a hot air balloon to the Internet, something he did with Senator Kate Lundy. On the most recent occasion, and this is where the Internet has huge implications for those of us in the media, we went to the official opening of Kate Lundy's office in Civic. I watched with interest as Tom took pictures using a digital camera of Kim Beazley cutting the ribbon, out came the card from the back of the camera, into the computer and then placed on the Web. The interesting thing about this that Tom had pictures of the opening on the Web before any of the conventional media had touched that story. Before radio, before television and before print. The implications are immense. Tom has chosen as his address today, Australia's Net Futures, and I think there might be a few politicians who are going to get their bums kicked. Would you welcome Tom Worthington.

Worthington: Thankyou for the opportunity to speak to you today. Now my disclaimer. I am here today in my capacity, a voluntary one, as President of the Australian Computer Society. I work for the Defence Department but I am not here as a Defence Department spokesman and nothing I say could be taken as representing a Defence position.

This is a live, Web-based presentation. What I have got here is my laptop computer that I normally carry around in my brief case. Plugged into that is a $99 modem. We had trouble getting a normal telephone line so instead I've plugged in a gsm telephone interface. We tested it before. It worked then. It may not work now. That is a digital phone working on the Telstra network, that was a coincidence. I will use the Trumpet software manufactured in Tasmania to dial up the Australian Computer Society's Internet Service Provider. We've got two. Some of these things are coming from a server in Brisbane and some are coming from a server in Melbourne and then other bits and pieces from assorted other servers around the world. There are a number of photographs in here to make it more entertaining which were taken with this camera, the digital camera that was used in the hot air balloon. I'll leave it there for Peter Talty to take some pictures of me.

The phone has dialled through the gsm network. It has established a connection to a modem which then dials on the normal telephone network to the service provider in Canberra. We've exchanged user ids and passwords and we have an ip address here now. This computer is now part of the Internet. It is not logged onto the Internet, it is part of the Internet. I won't check my mail in front of you. This is only a low speed connection, so we can't do video and things like that. We can see pictures. They are also cached in the computer, so if the link fails I should be able to get nearly everything.

I did this deliberately. Not only because its the way I normally give presentations but also to give you the sense that computing, information technology, is about using the technology to do useful things. There is a derogatory term in the computer business of slideware, that's software and hardware that runs best on a slide projector, not with the real thing. This is real technology actually going and there is an electroboard video projector to show you it.

Who has used the World Wide Web? (Most of the audience raised their hands.) Just about everybody.

Who has checked their email today? (Most of the audience raised their hands.) Just about everybody.

Who has designed a Web page and put it on the Internet in the last week? (Three quarters of the audience raised their hands). Goodness. I might as well go home, you know all this already.

Who has done 100 Web pages? (About half the audience raised their hands.) 500? (About 10 people raised their hands.) Okay, so we've got quite a few people who know that sort of thing. One thing that I am going to point out to you is that the Internet, the World Wide Web, is not the whole of information technology and computing. Computing existed for decades before these things entered the popular imagination and there is a role for professional bodies such as the Computer Society in these sorts of things.

On the table you have an ACS newsletter, just to give you a flavour of what the Computer Society does, and a print out of this presentation, which is also of course on the Web and has been for the last month. I actually sent out several drafts and got comments from people around the place. First thing is that I'm here for the Australian Computer Society so I should give an ad for the ACS. We had our 30th birthday party last week in Sydney with a dinner with people who have been in the computer industry for 30 years and more as well as some newies like myself, a very humbling event when you actually meet people who have soldered together some of the first computers in Australia.

There is a picture taken at the dinner with Andy Macdonald who gave us a keynote talk. the point about that is that the Computer Society has been around for decades. The Society is a professional body that does the sorts of things that professional bodies do. It talks about standards, what knowledge you need to be a professional, codes of conduct, complaint procedures, ongoing training, all that sort of thing. If you want all the gory detail you can go to the ACS homepage which that is the top of which mentions that we've got 15,000 members and been around for quite a few years. We have designed a new core body of knowledge. This is basically what we think that IT professionals need to know to be professionals and which tertiary institutions will be using to design their courses or computing type people and which they were able to comment on the content of. We have got a professional code of conduct, professional practice, sort of expands on the usual code of ethics that says you shouldn't do anything wrong. This goes into a whole lot of detail about what you should do in great detail. That's all online.

We've got a few ongoing programs where people who are already members and the industry can do short and longer courses to keep their skills up. As well as doing that the other thing the Society does is make submissions to assorted government inquiries and provide nominees for boards to do with computing and telecommunications type issues. I used to be the director of the community affairs board before I was the president. That was fun because that is the role where you get all of the issues that don't fit into a neat category elsewhere in the ACS hierarchy and I got all these issues to do with the information superhighway and computer pornography and promoting girls in IT careers and all those sorts of things. Some very interesting challenges.

I was told to be controversial. So the first controversial point. One of the things where we made submissions to government on an issue and they did not listen to what we said was to do with pay tv, subscription television type issues. Governments have been struggling, not only the current government but the previous government, to have a coherent telecommunications policy which includes things like pay television, the information superhighway, all of that. They are still struggling to have a coherent policy and really it's getting more difficult because we are having this convergence between what used to be telephones, what used to be television and radio and all of that into a combined media, a combined service. Us technologists are creating the problem for the policy makers and regulators by making all this possible. We've made submissions to suggest how to deal with some of those issues but it is certainly not easy. One of my themes is that our policy makers need to be better equipped to deal with those problems.

Controversial point: pay tv will not deliver the information superhighway. We currently have Telstra and Optus rolling out highbrid cable, partly fibre otic, particularly coaxial copper cable, around streets, initially for pay television, then for telephones, and then for data applications. Really it was not designed for information superhighway applications, it was primarily designed for pay television, which is an analogue service and then for the phones and the other stuff. This really was not designed for the information superhighway and I wonder how much investment we should make in that technology as a country. While I was in the UK visiting Cambridge University and the surrounding r&d companies a couple of weeks ago, one of the people I met is this gentleman. This is Andy Hopper who is the director of the Olivetti - Oracle Research Lab. This is his office. Not your average director. He has five video cameras in his office and about 15 microphones and sensors all over the place for experimenting with this sort of technology. He is holding in his hand a pen operated network computer. One of the researchers downstairs showed me a wireless interface at 25 megabits per second to connect this to multiple video sources so that he could watch five television programs at once if he wanted to. When that technology gets out of the laboratory and is available in the street - they're aiming initially to use it inside offices, that is the first market to worry about before using it in homes - it may mean that all that cable out there is then obsolete even before we have finished installing it all. That is the Olivetti homepage in Cambridge if you want to look at the work they are doing there. Quite an entertaining sort of place.

Which brings me onto another controversial point, the network computer. I should have mentioned that what you see on screen is the same document that you see on paper, but there is narrative text that you cannot read on the slides, with all the details in it. There are links built into that and you can go on line and go to ... this is the presentation that the gentleman from Oracle gave here recently, for example, and one from Sun.

Now the gadget they have at Cambridge at the Olivetti - Oracle Research Lab is a bit different to the network computer that Oracle and Sun were talking about. The classical network computer as defined in the reference profile for the network computer is basically a diskless pc in effect. You download the programs you need, the day you need, from the Internet and then the program runs on your own computer to do what ever you need doing and give you an answer. The Oracle gadget is a bit more like a television set. The processing is done remotely and the network transmits every keystroke you type or click on the screen and the answer comes back. It relies on a remote processor.

The point is that if you read the computer pages of the newspaper, you might think that there is some determinant direction that the computer industry is going and that it's all going to lead to some sort of particular technology. The network computer is not really like that. When you talk to the people building these gadgets they are not necessarily sure which one is going to work really well in practice, they are not sure who is going to buy what. You might remember that we were all going to have little pen operated gadgets that we would carry around in our pockets a few years ago. That was going to be the new trend. The personal digital assistant. That version only appeared at the newspaper stage, it never caught up on as a mass item. The technology sort of worked but it just didn't grab people. So be a little cautious about the grand ideas that people give you about where the technology is going and worry about what they are trying to sell. Basically, I'm only here to try and sell the Computer Society and the benefits of professionalism. I'm not selling a particular sort of computer. It will be interesting to see where the network computer heads. I suspect that we will have a revival of the personal digital assistant as the portable network computer.

Also while I was at Cambridge I visited the people at ATM, the people who make chips for computers, they also make chips for mobile phones and hand held things like the Apple Newton. I should imagine they'll be adding them all together to produce a hand held gadget which is an Internet workstation pretty soon and that might actually be a useful gadget with all those things in it. But until I get one and try it out to see if it works in the coffee shop I won't know if it works.

The danger of imported experts. I am delighted to see that at the Forum here you've had a mixture of Australian and overseas speakers. It worries me that there is almost a knee jerk reaction when you need an expert, particularly a computer expert, the first reaction is to go and get one overseas. They must know more than we do because they are from somewhere else. That is why I spent two weeks in the UK so that I could come here and be a local expert.

We have nothing to feel inferior about in the information technology area, particularly in the area of the Internet. We are a regional Internet superpower, in effect, because of our use of the technology.

Here are some people that I met with at Windsor in the UK, that was the purpose of the trip. These are the presidents of the US, German, UK, European, Japanese computer societies, the equivalents of the Australian Computer Society and we met to discuss how to use the Internet technology for our members. This is a global thing. It's not good enough that we provide services to our members here and put our publications online, why can't we provide all of the information technology literature to all of the members around the world. That was one issue that we discussed. I got them all to line up with their computers in front of them just to give it a high tech edge, otherwise it's just people. When we compared notes we found that we are basically doing the same sort of thing, the same sort of issues. I think the Computer Society was in some ways ahead of the pack with our use of the technology. For that and other reasons we are coordinating one aspect of how to provide a global online service. The first issue is, how do provide an index to all of the articles to do with IT that all of the computer societies have produced around the world, to your members. I will be asking for some assistance in that task.

The idea here is, that if you want a computer expert you may not have to look to another country, they may be sitting next to you, or in the next building. They might be a member of the Computer Society, they may not.

The information superhighway. My phone rang two elections ago and it was somebody saying, The Labor Party wants to put this proposal for fibre to the home in their election manifesto. Do you think that is a good idea? And I said, well, that is probably a little too technologically specific. It would be better just to talk about higher quality digital access to the home than fibre optic cabling to each house. The proposal went into the Labor platform, the Labor Party won the election but thankfully they had the good sense not to implement the policy. Instead they set up the Broadband Services Expert Group to look at the issue of how do you provide the information superhighway to the community, to the home.

The ACS, among others, provided a submission to that body. We also provided the online distribution of its initial paper, because at that stage it was not the done thing for government inquiries to put things out on the Internet. So they emailed me the initial paper and I put it up on the Archie ftp server to make it available. BSG was one of the first but then there was a whole assortment of government and parliamentary inquiries in this area. We got a bit lost with them all. In the end we made one submission to everybody. There was a lack of coordination between the various bodies making the inquiries. That is happening again. Now we have the IIT, the Information Industries Taskforce, being led by Ashley Goldsworthy. That is for DIST. The IPAC, the Information Policy Advisory Council - Communications and the Arts, the Disciplined Research Strategy for Information Technology looking at IT r&d in Australia and how it should be done, partly funded by DEETYA and partly by the ACS. This is their homepages.

And we also have OGIT, the Office of Government Information Technology, which is in the portfolio of the Minister for Finance. We have all these separate bodies looking at various aspects of computers and telecommunications, how they get delivered to the community, how we build an industry, how we export, all going off in their own directions. We could do with a little more coordination. The ACS is preparing a submission to the first one and I am going to propose that we expand it in the same way as the previous to cover them all to provide some external coordination of these things.

One thing all of these bodies are doing well now, all of these bodies are now at least putting their calls for submissions, their background papers on the Government Web pages which is very useful. The people in the IT community and the others who are connected can easily get the information, make submissions, compare notes. I can do things like link them all together. That is something that is going well but we could do with a little bit more coordination between the various bodies and do we really need all these separate bodies on overlapping issues.

Outsourcing - I thought I would try and be controversial. This is the latest management fad from overseas. The theory is to contract out a service to an external supplier, that increases your efficiency. You would have to question the logic of this in some key areas such as IT and you would have to wonder about whether we will have a loss of one of the allowable forms of industry support, things like international trade arrangements allow for, which is supporting your internal r&d effort that is buried inside government agencies, for instance, and also inside other areas. At the IFAT '96 conference, which the ACS sponsored, the 14th World Computer Congress in Canberra, one of the speakers actually wrote a paper on this issue, looked at it in Holland, you can read the paper online. They looked at it in the Netherlands. They argued that there were savings from outsourcing but they came not from outsourcing to the private company but from the discipline that commercial accounting practices provided. So even if you did the operation internally in your organisation and as long as you accounted for the dollars, knew what you were spending, what it was costing you, then you could get similar efficiencies. They also mentioned that there were some flexibility's that government agencies in particular need when the government changes, when the policy changes, that might be difficult to do if you have a fixed contract externally. But a lot of the issues apply internally as well.

The conference we had the other week, we had quite a few speakers from banks in particular talking about how they do their IT. Some were very keen on outsourcing, some were using internal operations with full cost recovery, profit centre type arrangements, others said that IT was part of their core business, we don't account for it separately. We just need it, if we didn't have it tomorrow we would be out of business. They all seemed to be quite happy that they were doing quite well. There are other ways to do these operations.

That is the Governor General opening the 14th World Computer Congress.

Just changing tack slightly. I'd suggest that we should look at using the Internet to change the way organisations work. This is my little enthusiasm at the moment. When we have worked out how to use it for organisational purposes, then we can create an export industry, to export the expertise as well as products. Here I am not necessarily talking about the Trumpet software that this computer is using to talk to the Internet, I'm talking about how to change the structure of organisations to make them work better, a higher management level use of the technology.

I think what we'll see is a looser form of organisation where the organisation is knitted together using the information technology. One example of that is the way that Federal Government agencies ended up with Web pages. I wrote a slightly irreverent article for a UNIX user group conference on this topic where we had an interdepartmental committee but essentially most work was done online using the Internet to coordinate the operation. There was a lot of assistance from academics and external people with advice on how to do it. The Commonwealth Internet Reference Group, which coordinated the Web pages, has an electronic mailing list that anybody can join. A lot of the work is done there and members of the press who are here are members of that mailing list and following what is going on and put in suggestions occasionally. It's an interesting way to carry out an operation online with people from outside your organisation involved. Of course, for part of this work you have to have a separate private closed list where only the people from within the organisation do some of the detail but you can have a grass roots operation in this way.

The Minister for Defence called for suggestions for the Defence Efficiency Review, and this is the terms of reference available on the Minister for Defence's homepage which up until Monday I administered. I put in a suggestion saying let's use the Internet like this. And there is the suggestion.

The idea there is that organisations have had to be in office buildings, administrative ones, because people need to be able to talk to each other and pass bits of paper and they needed to be in hierarchies so that you could filter a manageable amount of information up the chain and orders back down the chain. With this technology that is now obsolete. You don't need to be in the one building, and you don't need to be in one particular hierarchy, you may be in several hierarchies still or some other organisational structure. I have some examples of using the technology from interesting places.

While I was in Cambridge I bought a book on the history of printing and it argued that the invention of printing in some ways fixed ideas after the middle ages, fixed international political boundaries, the shapes of maps, and in some ways the way people think and I suggest the Internet may reverse some of that and that we may be in for a very uncertain time until we decide where new boundaries are.

One example: This is one of the Defence PR people on deployment in Kangaroo 95 with a laptop computer and a portable satellite dish and a Frontline baseball cap. I asked him about the baseball cap and he said it was a dig at his tv colleagues.
This is me at Mallacoota on holidays with a laptop computer and a pocket modem receiving the photographs and the reports, putting all the html tags on the Web pages, the logging onto the Defence homepage system in Canberra and uploading the Kangaroo 95 reports to the K 95 homepage. to the world at large reading these reports, thousands a day, they though I was sitting in Defence Department headquarters in Canberra in some sort of war room. In fact I was at Mallacoota in the coffee shop most of the time. We successfully transmitted a number of exercises and photos, exercise reports.

Of course. they were public reports, there wasn't any classified information here or sensitive information, so we could use the relatively simple available technology to do it. It just shows your the sorts of things you can do with this technology.

Net literate politicians. I am a little concerned that our politicians and senior executives are IT illiterate. That is not only senior executives in government agencies but in the commercial sector. One area that is pretty good, and not just because they are here now, are IT journalists from newspapers. The leading daily newspapers in the capital cities have specialist IT journalists who know quite a bit about this. The ABC produces tv programs about computers and the Internet and do pretty well but your average politician or company executive either doesn't know what to do or is actually afraid of touching the keyboard. That is causing problems in this day and age.

My nomination for the Net literate politician is Kate Lundy. This is the photo that was being mentioned earlier, Kim Beazley cutting the ribbon on Kate's homepage in her office. She actually does this. She sits at the keyboard and prepares the Web pages. I asked the Link mailing list, which is an electronic mailing list of people who are interested in these issues in Australia - this is the National Library of Australia details of how to join Link - for nominations of other Net literate politicians. They nominated Senator Bill O'Chee. He actually sent me a note to say that the House is sitting and discussing Telstra so he can't be hear. One issue he raised was the effect of transactions globally will have on our economic structure when companies can do their business from anywhere in the world, so tax havens may do very well out of it and that might be an issue we raise.

Link also nominated Minister Bishop as knowledgable on IT issues, the Democrats, John Forest, Duncan Kerr and the Parliament's homepage came in for praise as well. But we could do a lot better than that. There are a lot of politicians up there in the House. We could do with quite a few more who are familiar with these issues because they are going to come up a lot in the next few weeks and months.

What is going to happen? The talk is called Futures, plural, because there is more than one future possible. We are not driving down any particular multinational IT company executives view of the future. We can choose our own. I see a lot in the press about who is going to own the Internet. I own the Internet because I use it, I am a member of various organisations who are involved in it and you can own it in the same way as well.

Australia needs to join the world online. We need to discover how to network the nation. The Computer Society will help as well as other bodies. One thing we can do is build multilingual and multicultural technology.

One thing I noticed at my meetings in the UK was that the non- English native speakers, please remember that this isn't our native language, we need in someway to translate these documents so that we can read them. I even had trouble communicating with Chuck House. the President of the ACM, the US body. He said to me, can you have that report finished by Fall 97. I said, what's Fall 97? I am from a different hemisphere. We don't call it Fall. I was born in Queensland and we don't have autumn in Queensland, we only have summer and winter. So as well as language differences there are cultural differences.

Australia is in a situation to help with those because we have a multicultural society despite what some people might want. We can build on that strength to make the technology multicultural and as well as do something good for the nation we can export some products in that regard. There is a whole lot of other stuff and some pictures here we might go to. I might motor around while you are asking questions.

Questions

Ends

See also:

• High resolution photos of Tom Worthington at the NPC:
• Questions
• Speaker's notes and slides
• National Press Club - IM Forum
• Canberra Calendar of major events
• Australian Computer Society Home Page

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