Australian Computer SocietyAustralian Computer SocietyFollowing Nicholas Negroponte's opening address to the conference Tom Worthington will provide some comments and introduce the speakers. An afternoon session on Future Directions in Electronic Service Delivery in the Public Sector will feature recent developments in on-line government services.
Mr Worthington is Special Adviser for Internet/Intranet Policy, with the Australian Department of Defence and Immediate Past President of the Australian Computer Society. Tom wrote the ACS Communique on IT higher education in 1998, launched the ACS/PAGE on-line postgraduate program in December 1997 and was a steering committee member of the Discipline Research Strategy for Information Technology.
Tom is a member of the Australian Computer Society, voting member of the Association for Computing Machinery, member of the Internet Society and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers Computer Society. He is a member of the Council of Standards Australia.
Information Age magazine lists Mr. Worthington as one of the 10 most influential IT&T people in Australia in 1998. His work since 1994 has been on the policy and practice of implementation of the Internet, including appearances before three Senate hearings. He established the first web home pages for the ACT Government, the Special Broadcasting Service, Australian Information Industry Association and the National Press Club.
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Draft of 7 May 1998: The content of this talk will be developed here. The printed version for the proceedings is available and "slides" are also available. This document is: http://www.acs.org.au/president/1997/outsrc/pubit.htm Suggestions and comments welcome: tom.worthington@tomw.net.au
As conference chair my job is both easy, and difficult: it is easy because I don't have to prepare a detailed presentation of my own; it's difficult because I have to try to bring together the threads of the speakers' presentations and relate it to the topic of the event. This is made more difficult by having to begin after the presentation of a person of Nicholas Negroponte's stature.
What I would like to do is share with you at the start, and at a few points during the day, some insights from my work on IT policy with the Department of Defence and the Australian Computer Society.
But first where to start? Presented with a list of topics and speakers at a conference (or some public policy to write), my first step is to do a web search. Below are some of the items I found on-line in about 30 minutes.
Not surprisingly I found many thousands of references to Nicholas Negroponte. However, I also found useful references to our Australian speakers, their organizations and their projects.
Using various measures of Internet use, Australia is about number four in the world. Let me repeat that in case you missed it: Australia is about number four in the world on-line. In regional terms Australia is the information superpower of South East Asia. In terms of the sophistication of our public sector applications and policy, I suggest we are number one in the world.
During this event I hope we can look at how to exploit that advantage for benefit of the community.
Here are excerpts of a few items a search of our conference speakers and their organisations found:
Nicholas Negroponte is a founder and the director of the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology's Media Laboratory The
ten-year-old Media Lab is an interdisciplinary research center for the study of
future forms of human communication (12).
An on-line version of Nicholas Negroponte's bestselling "Being Digital", with a discussion forum is available (13).
Window on the Law is the Australian Government entry point to all Australian Government legal resources. This is the official site of the Commonwealth Attorney-General's Department and portfolio and provides a "Window on the Law" to much Australian legislation and judgments of courts.From: Window on the Law Home Page, Commonwealth Attorney-General's Department (14).
Beginning in the late 1970s, South Australia was one of the first state governments, if not the first, to make the change to electronic media. Many of the people who worked in the government's land titles office have since left to form their own companies. The state has more than 120 such spin-offs.
From Antipodes: Back to the future Adelaide style, Bob Johnstone, New Scientist, 27 September 1997 (15).
Helen Ringrose joined the Brisbane City Council in 1995 as Manager of the Customer and Corporate Services Department. In the new structure, Helen is responsible for Property Management, Supply Services, Information Technology and Telecommunications and Customer Service Integration.
From: Executive Management Team, Brisbane City Council Home Page (16).
What are the future directions in electronic service delivery in the public sector? I don't really know. In past predictions I have been wildly optimistic or pessimistic.
Examples of optimism are that in 1987 I wrote an article about how the year 2000 problem wasn't a big problem (1). In 1994 I wrote how e-mail was about to overtake paper memos for inter-agency communications in the federal government (2). The year 2000 has turned out to be a bigger problem than I thought and as ACS President I was obliged to issue a warning to the profession and the community on its possible consequences (3). My prediction on how e-mail was about to overtake memos in government may be about to come true, four years late (every year someone in the Department of Finance sends me an anonymous copy of the article with the bit about the prediction highlighted).
In 1996 I gave a "future history" talk to the ACS North Queensland Chapter (4), looking at information technology from the perspective of Australia in the year 2005:
The Internet will become dominant for communications. Wireless connections will replace Pay TV cable to homes. PCs will be replaced by cheap disposable calculator like devices, downloading data and programs from the Internet. Net regulation will influence election outcomes. Big companies will be replaced by small networked businesses of teleworkers. Australia will dominate the world information economy, in partnership with Asia...Like the Cold War of the 1960s, the PC operating systems wars of the 1990s seem a quaint oddity in 2005. No one really cares too much if their PADD runs Microsoft's new Windows'2005 operating system or IBM's OS/2005. Many people prefer the free Linux/2005 (which won its inventor the Nobel prize in 1999).
It is seven years short of 2005, but some of the predictions are already coming true. The Internet is becoming a dominant form of communications. Pay TV cabling hasn't provided the information superhighway that some predicted (but wireless isn't quite here yet). Pocket sized computers are making a comeback. Net regulation is an issue which politicians are now addressing. The move to networked businesses of teleworkers is underway. Australia isn't quite dominating the world information economy, but the Asian recession may provide that opportunity. Linux (a free Unix-like operating system for PCs) is becoming a serious competitor to Microsoft Windows.
Since my predictions aren't that reliable, what trends can we see in the present? Almost too obvious to mention is that the Internet will be used for electronic service delivery.
In setting up the first Commonwealth Government home pages in 1995, the Commonwealth Internet Reference Group (CIRG), convened by Ian Barndt, (5), used a strategy of doing the easy bits first: providing free information already available to the public on paper and bringing together existing services. This success was recently consolidated with the move of the Australian Commonwealth Government Entry Point to its own domain of http://fed.gov.au/. Exactly why the service isn't called the "government home page" is a long story. ;-)
The Government home page provides:
While I helped envisage this system and build it, the power and potential is something I am just starting to realise. As an example it is now possible to search all or selected agencies for keywords. It is also possible to be automatically advised by e-mail each day of new media releases from any, or all agencies on a specific topic.
The power of these facilities will be greatly enhanced when other recommendations of the Information Management Steering Committee (6) have been implemented. These included tagging of web pages with meta-data and search engines to find it (7).
The Hansard is now available on-line, as are many reports of committees and e-mail addresses of Members and Senators. They (or their staff) do read the e-mail. I regularly send ACS items to members and get back thoughtful replies. While there is a directory of senior federal personnel, few of them have e-mail addresses listed at the moment.
In all the hype about electronic commerce, the potential for paying bills on-line and the like, don't forget that the main service which the public service delivers is not commerce, it is government. The technology has the potential not just to deliver government services, but is now starting to deliver government on-line.
Another trend is to use intranets to replace specialised computer networks to facilitate delivery of services. The client never sees the intranet, but it is used to co-ordinate their service.
The intranets have come after the public web services, as they require a level of security to keep client information within Government agencies (and their commercial contractors). The issue of how to provide an internal network which keeps internal information and also has access to the Internet, is one occupying much time of Government people.
The latest and most public government intranet project is The Australian Federal Government Network & Applications Project, better knows as FEDLINK. It was announced by the Prime Minister 8 December 1997 as part of the Investing for Growth statement (8). The Department of Defence is the lead agency for the initial infrastructure phase of the project and Department of Primary Industries & Energy for the applications phase (9).
The idea is to provide a secure on-line intranet environment for the Commonwealth Government, initially in Canberra. It will be used for intra-government communications, including voice, data, TV, multimedia and electronic business transactions.
Well, that is what the FedLink public relations material says. I can see the network being used for less glamorous, more everyday applications: to replace all those bits of paper which pass between agencies each day. Much of this material isn't highly classified, but still isn't something we would want on the Internet in the clear.
FedLink should precipitate a revolution in the way Government services are conceived delivered. Tasks which took days of bureaucratic organisation, paperwork and phone calls can be done on-line in minutes. Perhaps my prediction of on-line communications in government overtaking paper will finally become true. ;-)
My job is: To Promote the Security of Australia, and to Protect its People and its Interests, as it says on the Defence Home Page (10). Providing national security is a very specialised form of electronic service delivery. As well as the obvious public relations information provided to the public, the Defence Department uses specialised classified intranets and web services to conduct military operations (11).
| 8.30 | Registration and coffee | |
| 8.45 | Welcome and opening remarks | |
| 9:00 | Global business. Being Digital. Staying digital
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| 11.15 | Short morning tea break, delegates move to Public Sector IT Conference room | |
| 11.30 | Welcoming remarks from the Chair Introductory remarks from the chair which will include a short debriefing session on the presentation by Professor Nicholas Negroponte Tom Worthington, Immediate Past President, AUSTRALIAN COMPUTER SOCIETY |
| 11.50 | Public sector Intranet and Internet strategies, Case Study: Attorney
General’s Department
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| 12.30 | The use of spatial information in the Public Sector Government Internets and Intranets allowing access to electronically stored data. More than 80% of all information used by business and governments can be spatially referenced. Spatial information initiatives and infrastructures are growing. Spatial industry allows marked cost benefits in data analysis and has applications in areas including asset management and land title management. Susan Butler will provide a working case of the South Australia Government-Fujitsu Spatial Alliance Susan Butler, Director, INFORMATION SERVICES GROUP |
| 1.10 | Panel Discussion The future directions in electronic service delivery in the public sector The challenges facing service delivery from a Government perspective are wide ranging and are already changing the way your public sector organisations do business worldwide. Facilitated by Tom Worthington |
| 1.30 | Lunch |
| 2.50 | Meeting the challenge of National Competition Policy: An information approach
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| 3.40 | CTI in a working environment: Case Study, 0-0-0 Call centre, Telstra
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| 4.20 | Afternoon Tea |
| 4.40 | Brisbane City Council’s mobile office technologies
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| 5.20 | Closing remarks from the Chair and discussion Take this opportunity to leave the conference with a clear view of the issues raised this afternoon as they stand for your organisation. Ensure you are able to take back the answers to add immediate value to your organisation |
| 5.30 | Close of day one |