The first speaker for the eGovernment forum was the federal Special Minister of State, the Hon. Gary Gray, whose presentation who talked about the role of technology in driving productivity gains, including his own experiences in his home in regional WA. Gray also referenced the National Digital Economy Strategy launched by the National Digital Economy Strategy launched by the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Senator the Hon. Stephen Conroy.

Gray was followed by the Australian Australian Government chief information officer, Ann Steward. She opened by referencing the McKinsey Global Institute report of May 2011 which includes some interesting statistics regarding the important of the Internet to various developed economies, and talked about the ongoing role of AGIMO in driving the eGovernment agenda. She also talked about the government’s work with numerous agencies on benchmarking, to ensure that the investments being made are delivering productivity gains. Government spending on IT has been stable for the past three years while service delivery has improved, and the government has been encouraging telepresence within government departments. Other topics covered were the need to progress the data.gov.au strategy of making government data available to external parties, and AGIMO’s cloud strategy to provide a new platform for IT procurement. And finally she discussed the government’s strategy for managing location-based information, with the goal of ‘spatially-enabling’ the Australian government.

In an interview with ComputerWorld Australia Editor Trevor Clarke, Dr Kelly said the broader intangible benefits of investment in broadband meant that it was rarely if ever a bad investment, and the Bank’s research indicated that every 10 percent increase in broadband penetration delivered a 1.4 percent increase in GDP.

You can read the article by clicking here.