[LINK] Australia’s Digital Economy : Future Di rections

[Frank O'Connor]

And I suppose these clowns think they are part of the Digital Economy.

A few things you can always rely on with government e-initiatives:

1. They will be so far behind everyone else's game plan that they are 
positively antiquated. (One could be kind and call them 'quaint' but 
I'm not feeling especially charitable.)

2. They will attempt to reinvent the wheel and impose their own 
(depressingly low and non-open) standards. If it can be done using 
proprietary standards it will be done using the most inappropriate, 
expensive, proprietary standards.

3. They will cost the earth and support whole new levels of 
bureaucracy in our public service.

4. They will adopt security standards and processes which will 
essentially make them unusable.

5. They will mirror, rather than reinvent or improve, existing public 
service processes.

6. They will have an implementation timetable for a mega-system which 
will be available in 5 to 10 years ... when it will be essentially 
obsolete. (They seem to be incapable of cheap, incremental 
development and implementation which is the rule elsewhere on the Web)

7. They will 'go it alone' rather than integrating with existing 
services on the Web.

8. They won't be integrated across departments and bureaucratic fiefs 
- so users will be forced to contact multiple sites and conduct 
multiple transactions to get what should be a single transaction done.

9. They won't offer credit card and other services that merchants 
routinely offer ... because paying anything to third parties for 
services is for some reason verboten in government ... so all 
transactions will also involve snail mail and cheques.

10. Whatever Grand Plan they eventually come up with will be another 
monumental and expensive failure ... but hey, Joe Public is paying 
for it ... so who cares?

The depths of my level of cynicism for government initiatives (Web 2, 
NBN, filtering, digital economy or whatever) have yet to be plumbed. 
In my experience they are fundamentally incapable of getting anything 
Internet-wise right.

					Regards,


At 1:32 PM +1000 7/7/09, Tom Worthington wrote:
>At 08:55 AM 7/07/2009, I wrote:
>>Senator Stephen Conroy ... is launching "Australia's Digital
>>Economy: Future Directions" next week.... I tried checking the
>>Department's web page about the work, but this now says "You do not
>>have permission to access Digital Economy Consultation"  ...
>
>In response DBCDE have advised me that they moved the web page to a
>new address:
><<http://www.dbcde.gov.au/digital_economy/future_directions_of_the_digital_economy/digital_economy_consultation_paper>http://www.dbcde.gov.au/digital_economy/future_directions_of_the_digital_economy/digital_economy_consultation_paper>.
>
>This must have happened very recently, as the new address does not
>seem to have yet been indexed by Google, the Australian Government or
>the DBCDE search engine. According to the metadata in the page, it
>was created 2 July 2009 and so should have been indexed by the DBCDE
>search engine by now, if not the WoG or Google engines.
>
>
>
>Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
>Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
>PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617                      http://www.tomw.net.au/
>Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Australian National University 
>
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