Serious Business on the Internet: Friday 24 May 1996, Perth

Australian Computer Society

Serious Business on the Internet

The view from Canberra

by Tom Worthington, President of the Australian Computer Society

Friday 24 May 1996

9:00am to 12:30pm, Novotel Langley, Perth

Announcement & Summary

Tom Worthington will demonstrate several Internet based applications from major Australian companies and government agencies. He will illustrate how organisations are using the Internet as a strategic component of their business, and it's wider implications for longer term planning. Tom will outline the up-to-minute developments in on-line policy and implementation by the Commonwealth Government. He will also details the steps Australian private and public organisations need to take to have a stake in the global information industry. Having appeared before a number of Parliamentary and Government enquiries into regulation of the Internet, Tom can discuss the outcomes of likely policy decisions and what they mean to Government, Industry and Commerce.

About the speaker

Tom Worthington is National President of the Australian Computer Society and Deputy Director, Information management Planning, Australian Department of Defence. Tom is co-author of the ACS InfoBahn Policy, the Defence Representative on the Commonwealth Internet Reference Group and has been described by Information Age magazine as one of the 50 most influential IT&T people in Australia.

Book Now

For more registration details contact the ACS office: ph 09 470 4878 or E-mail: lena@acslink.net.au

Draft of 23 May 1996: The content of this talk will be developed here between 11 and 24 May. Suggestions and comments welcome: tom.worthington@tomw.net.au

Internet applications from Australian organisations
Internet as a strategic weapon
Commonwealth Government on-line policy and implementation
Australia's stake in the global information industry
See also

Internet applications from Australian organisations

Advance Bank: Banking on the Internet with sophisticated security.
Australian Governments' Entry Point: A directory of all Australian Government sources of information on the Internet: local, state and federal.
Minister for Defence: A simple home page design.
Telstra White and Yellow Page Directories: Visually attractive on-line telephone directory, with useful features.
Government Electronic Marketplace Service: Government tenders on-line. A Spartan layout, but useful up-to date content.
AAA World Announce Archive: Advertising on the 'net, to support a useful comment service.
Sausage Software: An Australian IT company selling its software on-line.
Trumpet Software: Another Australian IT company, but with a more austere home page.
Guide to Australia: Sophisticated and comprehensive directory, but not run for profit.

Internet as a strategic weapon

Small is big: Large projects can be knitted together from small isolated pieces using the Internet. As an example the Commonwealth Government Home page at the NLA is only a few thousand bytes of information, but links together all of the known Government information available on the Internet.
Fun is serious: One major application for the Internet is entertainment. But non-entertainment information has to be interesting as well. People don't want to read dull information. This has always been the case, its just that with the Internet they let you know quicker. During K96 I received feedback from readers, which was relayed back to the PR people in the field, to improve the reports. You may not think that photos of Army Land Rovers are interesting, but the Land Rover lovers told me so.
Academics are practical: If you want to see the latest ideas on how to use the Internet for business, go to a University. Most of what is written about by the new crop of industry Internet so-called experts has been routine in our universities for years (up to ten years). The ACS and Commonwealth Government Internet use was built on experience of our Universities. Workshop exercise: How do you organise and publicise a talk in WA?
Free makes money: Everyone likes to "try before you buy". Experience shows that this is about the only way to make money on the Internet. Provide a limited version of your product free and sell the advanced version.
The Internet is your internal corporate network: Much nonsense is now talked about Intranets in the IT press. A more correct term would be an internet (with a small I), which means a network of networks. Intranets are a short term, crude solution to the problem of Internet security and will fade away in a few months. All organisations need to communicate to others and so need The Internet, not a toy internet.
The Web is glamorous; but plain old e-mail, news, FTP and telnet are still useful: The Internet is built in layers, with newer functions built on the foundations of the old. The old stuff still works, is cheap and robust. The Web is much more useful when combined with e-mail, news, FTP and even telnet.
Your staff aren't your staff: Your staff have "got a life" outside work, also people who aren't staff will be doing some of your work. So you can't isolate your IT system on an "internal" network and can't forget the wider needs of staff.
Every coffee shop is your office: Large office buildings for administrative work are a temporary aberration, brought about by limited communications. Now that your information and colleagues are on-line, how are you going to reorganise your business? Workshop exercise: How would you run your organisation from a coffee shop?

Commonwealth Government on-line policy and implementation

Vision for a Networked Nation, ACS submission to ASTEC, BSEG, BBS Task Force & Senate, 17 May 1994
Networking Australia's Future: Interim report of the Broadband Services Expert Group, JULY 1994
Commonwealth Internet Reference Group: Working level group which produced and implemented the Commonwealth Internet strategy. Retrofitted into the GISPB structure, but worked in advance of official policy.
Creative Nation: Commonwealth Cultural Policy, October 1994
Clients First; the report from the Information Technology Expert Group, 1 MARCH 1995
Office of Government Information Technology: For Public Service IT reforms and cost savings.
Information Policy Committee Structure (Chart): Complex attempt to merge community and internal Public Service InfoBahn issues.
IT Blueprint Exposure Draft, January 1996: OGIT's proposals to rationalise Government IT and use the Internet.
Architecture For Access To Government Information: Draft report on indexing all Australian Government information and putting the index on the Internet. Blend of traditional and Internet working methods.
1996 Questionnaire on Government Internet Practices
Some non-Canberra items:
- Managing the Information Resource: WA Strategic Information and IT Unit
- Public Key Authentication Framework for Australia: comments on the Standards Australia Draft DR 96078

Australia's stake in the global information industry

Mix of showmanship and technology: The Java programming language is an excellent example of promotion of a new product. This is an okay programming language, which has a lot of potential. However its current popularity comes more from the trendy name and the mythology surrounding the company promoting it, than from real advantages.
We are number five in the world: Australia is about number five in the world, as measured by the number of servers connected. This puts us ahead of many industrialised nations. In the region we are an Internet super-power. However our business and Government leaders don't know it and don't use this advantage.
Academia is our R&D lab: Our Universities are generating potential Internet products and exploitable techniques at a prodigious rate. However most of this output is being wasted. Each week I attend a free public talk at the ADFA Computer Science Department. Almost every week there is something of practical commercial value. One example is: "From Hypertext to Flat Text: A Tool for Document Construction", by Mr Wanli Ma. There is a danger that this research will soon cease: if no one values or uses it, the government will stop funding it.
Join the ACS in promoting Australia:
- SEARCC'96: South East Asia Regional Computer Confederation conference, July, Bangkok
- IFIP'96: 14'th World Computer Congress, September, Canberra
- On-line all the time
Just do it

About the ACS

The Australian Computer Society is the professional association in Australia for those in the computing and information technology fields. It was established in 1966. The Society has over 16,000 members and on a per capita basis is one of the largest computer societies in the world.

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