I’m currently in Australia visiting Intellect’s counterpart, the Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA) and I’ve got some fascinating insights since my arrival here.

“G’Day.” (They really do say this – even in a business setting!). Jack, one of AIIA members, picked me up at Canberra airport after what seemed like a lifetime on three successive planes. “The bill’s being paid by AIIA?” queried the receptionist at Canberra’s smartest hotel as Jack helped me check in. “Yes”. “Including incidentals?” “Er… maybe not the Krug” Jack joked weakly, clearly nervous about the open cheque he was signing. Angus, Intellect’s Financial Director, would have been proud of him. Nice room, unpacked, now what? Sleep/run.. run/sleep? Opted for a short run on the ‘try to get on local time asap’ principle. I was told last night that Oz city maps are always bigger (or is that smaller) scale than UK. Which could explain why I ended up running for an hour – not 30 minutes as I’d planned.

On Sunday afternoon I had a briefing in AIIA’s office followed by drinks and dinner with Ann Steward and her colleagues and some AIIA board members, including Fujitsu who are generously sponsoring my trip.

The run/sleep strategy seemed to work as I began Monday fresh from a full night’s kip. Just as well as we visited two cabinet ministers and then had a two hour presentation and Q&A with a collection of CIOs and industry on our public sector programme.

The ministerial meetings were a revelation. Unfortunately the PM was busy and so couldn’t meet, something about a global economic crisis! But I did meet with the Australian equivalents of Stephen Carter (Stephen Conroy -The Digital Economy minister) and Alistair Darling (ish) (Lyndsay Tanner – the Finance Minster).

Both were very open and completely switched on to the role of technology in a modern economy and assured me the vision really started with the PM Kevin Rudd. I asked Stephen how he’d managed to persuade his ministerial colleagues to commit to spend A$43bn on a 100mb next generation network. In summary they were tossing billions on banks and car yards so why not into something that would put Australia in a good place for the future? A refreshingly forthright approach I think you’ll agree.

I was also interested to hear that the AIIA had also produced something similar to the ITIF report and Stephen said it arrived just at the right time to support the case. Lyndsay was full of praise for the Peter Gershon work and also talked about the web 2.0 pilots they are running. This is very similar to UK Power of Information work which they were very aware of.

A very enlightening first couple of days, and with more lunches and dinners on the agenda it looks like I’ll need to keep running! Tomorrow starts with coffee with the British High Commissioner and ends with a flight to Melbourne for another workshop with members on Wednesday – then repeated Thursday & Friday in Brisbane and Sydney. I’ll keep you posted.

The football season is over (it isn’t really but that’s what you tell people who don’t like football) but talk of league tables isn’t. In fact, having just submitted the Intellect response to the DECC consultation on The Carbon Reduction Commitment, league tables are very much front of mind. I can’t help thinking that the hackneyed old saying from football managers past and present that “the table doesn’t lie” might not be true when it comes to Government carbon reduction policy. If the CRC goes through as drafted it could lead to the publication of misleading company league tables that don’t accurately reflect the energy efficiency gains made by those listed. It could could be particularly bad for IT companies who take on the energy liability of other organisations when IT functions are outsourced to them. These processes will probably be carried out far more efficiently but the IT company will in effect be penalised in the lague table for growing it’s business and saving energy! The CBI and Intellect are together on challenging this and we hope things will change otherwise football managers everywhere will have to add a caveat to their favourite soundbite.

The power went out at Intellect HQ last week. No servers, no email, no phones and no coffee machine. The office ground to halt. Although it was nice to see people’s faces rising from their screens and hear the level of natter rise, it was a reminder of the hazards of national reliance on information infrastructure.

The UK is a net-enabled society. Our businesses are technology junkies, becoming ever more reliant on networked infrastructure as the years progress. And rightly so – with the use of technology we are have been able to develop our economy, improve our national health system, our security services and our police systems.

It was only yesterday I was reminded about the perils of national digitalisation whilst sat in an Intellect cyber threats group meeting. When you talk to people working in the security and resilience field, it really does drive home the importance of backing up our national move towards a digital economy with the correct processes and contingency plans to hold the system up when things go wrong.

And things really do go wrong. Hackers can bring down government websites and disrupt access to public services and power outages from manmade or natural disaster can bring businesses to their knees.

In January this year BERR and DCLG released their interim Digital Britain report. Intellect supports the move towards digitalisation and the benefits it can bring to citizens. But this move must not be made blindly – Government must consider that a move towards a digital nation means that appropriate security and resilience measures need to be put into place to ensure that new infrastructure is robust. Loss or denial of that infrastructure, whether intentional or accidental has a number of nasty consequences that can be mitigated with thorough scenario planning and appropriate security and resilience considerations. To be fully effective, security must be considered as an intrinsic part of the process, not simply an afterthought when things go wrong.

p.s title is reference to a Satnogold song about power outages – for a musical accompanyment to your blog reading please feel free to listen here

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