One month after the Federal Government released its report into the digital economy a group comprising industry representatives and ICT companies has developed a 10-year roadmap.
Titled, Towards a Smarter Economy: A roadmap to making it happen, the report was created on the back of discussions at the Australian Leadership Forum (ALF) in Sydney in late April, which was hosted by IBM and the Australian Industry Group and involved 40 representatives from the public and private sector.
The report sets out the 10-year roadmap with the aim of creating a “comprehensive and integrated plan that provides a single view of the whole program of effort required and the matching benefit streams”.
It calls for a quick and solid start to building smarter infrastructure in the energy, water, traffic, healthcare and broadband communications sectors.
But much like the government’s digital economy report, the roadmap is light on specific detail for future projects, instead focusing on motherhood statements and revisiting the well-documented benefits of using smart technologies in infrastructure projects.
It does, however, go further than the government’s report by setting out a timeline for the roadmap with three phases. The first, to be completed by December this year, is to refine the agenda to “develop a sharp view on the required enablers and some of the constraints that may arise”.
The second phase is targeted to be completed by December 2010, and involves shaping the initiatives “into manageable pieces, defining the sequencing and timing and the overall governance arrangements”. The third phase is focused on delivering the initiatives over the remainder of the 10 years.
In July, another industry representative body recently-formed by the Federal Government said it would also have a roadmap finalised by September for IT innovation.
The report can be downloaded here.
