NBN: Demand Forecasts and Liberal Policies

The NBN started as an estimated $5B Rudd/Conroy project tender to deploy Fibre-to-the-Node, to which the owner of the copper network to the Nodes, Telstra, declined to respond beyond a single page.

The next iteration was the $43B Rudd/Conroy Fibre-to-the-Home (FttH) scheme as a tertiary-level Stimulus Package, addressing longer-term impacts of the GFC. It hadn't been ALP policy before then.

After Kevin '07 became Toast '10, Gillard/Conroy had the opportunity to walk away from the NBN, but the ALP became wedded to the NBN in the 2010 election.

In the spirit of the knife-edge Parliament, the Abbott/Turnbull Opposition stance on the NBN is "not what they said", with Turnbull initially charged by Abbott with "destroy the NBN" and now having morphed that into "we'll do it cheaper, with less waste".

The NBN is the most notable current place where Politics meets Engineering.

Changing IT from a Cost Centre to a Profit Centre.

1. ICT is a "force multiplier" (or 'cognitive amplifier').
It enables services and work to be performed "Better, Cheaper, Faster" (BCE).

It Amplifies the Effectiveness of staff at 3 levels:

• individuals can perform tasks "Better, Cheaper, Faster", can need 5-25 times fewer staff.
• co-ordination and communication tasks become 'zero-friction' improving cross-boundary efficiency and effectiveness. 
• Reducing team & Department sizes removes delays and other barriers to productivity and efficiency.
• Organisationally, decisions can be taken faster, with more informed sources and promulgated/implemented in real-time. Yielding much more agile and responsive products and services.

The future of IT Performance Analysis and Reporting

As IT/Computing moves through successive "event horizons" to becoming Ubiquitous, Universal and Invisible [like petrol, tyres, home telephones, plastic bags and ATM's], I think we need to monitor, model and report "Performance" in 3 areas:

• Organisationally: For every dollar spent on ICT, what revenue and profit does it bring?
• Technically: For each IT system and Computing Application, how does it scale, where are its bottlenecks and 
• Business Systems and Apps: What are our ICT, staff and resource input costs? Where our bottlenecks? What investments are needed to optimise throughput, reduce costs and increase revenues?

E-mail privacy: can I send a copy without permission?

This is not an extensive review of the field, nor is it legal advice.

I wanted to inform myself of the limits of what I could do with an email that had come into my possession. One of the parties, known from the content to be very aggressive and sometimes threatening, I wasn't prepared to approach for permission, whilst the other, when I did, was happy to publish the interchange on-line.