ICT industry unites under a 10-year vision

The National ICT Industry Alliance (NICTIA) has released a 10-year strategic vision for development of the Australian ICT industry.

The vision statement sets out 12 parameters that members of NICTIA consider crucial to Australia's economic prosperity because of the role of information and communications technology as an enabling technology supporting all sectors of the Australian economy.

It represents a structure or framework for developing an internationally competitive ICT sector in Australia and aims to:

• Promote entrepreneurial activity and infrastructure development through a supportive policy, regulatory and legislative environment, whilst having regard to appropriate consumer safeguards;
• Enhance our capabilities, create demand for and drive commercialisation of innovation and development of new products and services;
• Foster scale and enhance the ability of our firms to attract the necessary venture capital to create, exploit and globally license intellectual property;
• Link Australian ICT to the global market and provide guidance and focus to the Australian community and business over the next 10 years;
• Improve Australia's ICT export performance. Its success should be measured on the basis of an achieved increase in exports over current export levels of at least 10% each year.

"The Alliance is looking for governments across Australia to use the 12 parameters as a reference point to build an environment conducive to innovation based on enhanced information and communications technologies throughout the economy," Tony Hill, President, NICTIA, said.

"The ICT industry has come together to set a path for energising Australian innovation in the ICT sector and across other sectors of the economy, which underpins the successful development of ICT and our ICT professionals, to foster economic prosperity and ultimately Australia's standard of living.

"Australia is a poor promoter and exporter of its own innovation. Ironically, Australia's greatest comparative advantage is our strong solutions development and technology integration capability, but governments and government agencies have been slow to recognise it as a product, and need to develop a better understanding of how to nurture, assist and help commercialise this national capacity. We now have the intellectual property for governments and industry to work together to strengthen the industry's competitiveness."

NICTIA calls upon all governments to adopt the 10-year plan as a priority and to put into place the policy and regulatory elements necessary to facilitate its uptake within the public sector and industry.