Laying the foundations and improving the infrastructure is the first task of the strategy. Figure 15 illustrates how this task links to other essential components of the Ballarat ICT 2030 strategic framework. There are five target groups in our strategy: new firms, growing existing firms, ICT firms locating in Ballarat, adoption by non-ICT leading industries, and by the wider Ballarat community.
Without an adequate infrastructure the ICT sector in Ballarat cannot be competitive. The foundations of a future dynamic ICT centre will require both hard (physical) and soft infrastructure. The main types of infrastructure are listed below, along with the sectors or nodes of growth that require them.
Emerging technologies and trends will require significantly enhanced infrastructure to fully capitalise on potential economic and social benefits. In the future symmetric broadband capability will become a requirement for all industries and communities.
Whilst large multinationals may create their own infrastructure, individuals and SMEs, who make up the vast majority of ICT companies, typically depend on existing physical infrastructure. Ballarat needs to ensure it has infrastructure with capacity, coverage and competitiveness for international business. The region will lose ground rapidly without access to world-class infrastructure in terms of genuinely high-speed symmetric broadband, fibre to the node and high-speed wireless. Current speeds are approximately 15 percent of that experienced in countries like Korea or Finland and only one percent of the speed of the broadband recently developed by CSIRO.
Without appropriate infrastructure, progress will be slow and all the expert and user panels and individual experts noted the need for improved infrastructure in the form of faster and better-distributed broadband, an extension of wireless throughout the City, and regular upgrading of this. This requires major investments but should be a central feature of any strategy the City implements. The increasing trend for software to be accessed and data to be stored on remote 'server farms' exacerbates the City's need for faster, higher capacity broadband.
Entrepreneurship: Recent work by ACS (2007), suggests that infrastructure, capital and technology alone will not achieve growth. For new business growth there must be concerted entrepreneurship training and development. In both the corporate and community sectors, visionary leadership is also required. Ballarat's ability to develop entrepreneurs and leaders is central to the growth of new and existing ICT businesses in the region. There are already good examples of ICT entrepreneurs (referred to in Section 5) but it is important to continue to invest and develop entrepreneurial infrastructure. This may be as important to future growth as the development of physical ICT infrastructure.
New enterprise development is an important goal of this strategy. The potential for Ballarat to attract major new multinational investors is low and organic growth maybe the main way forward. However, establishing economic and technological preconditions for organic growth may be difficult.
Leadership: In Section 2 we confirmed that the purpose and scope of the Ballarat ICT 2030 included the aims to establish Ballarat as a globally competitive ICT centre and provide an ICT and associated infrastructure that facilities the development, adoption and use of ICT to achieve productivity gains, innovation and differentiation of products and services. We also identified that specific levers that Local Government in collaboration with other public bodies can use included championing, encouraging and facilitating the establishment of hard and soft infrastructure and fostering the adoption of new technologies by industry and the broader community.
Through strong leadership and advocacy Ballarat will work with other interests to mobilise the local industry, understand the importance of emerging trends and attract the investment that is required to rapidly develop infrastructure that is competitive when benchmarked against national and international regions.
Consultation activities as well as the literature on regional development have confirmed the importance of having a coordinating body to oversee the implementation of the ICT 2030 Strategy. cBallarat has served Ballarat well in terms of advocating and attracting resources and providing a conduit for communicating with State and Federal Government but needs a clearer identity for promoting and supporting ICT development towards 2030.
We recommend that cBallarat changes its name to Ballarat ICT. Ballarat ICT will mobilise resources and advocate actions around the vision and recommendations of ICT 2030. It will retain its focus on providing leadership and advocacy for ICT to support development of new and existing firms, investment attraction, and community and business adoption of ICT. Membership of the new entity will be strengthened though greater participation of the ICT industry whilst also achieving representation from key regional sectors such as health, agriculture, education, manufacturing and services.
Training, R&D and collaborative links: The final dimensions of infrastructure include the investment and development of training and R&D, and provision of support for the development of collaborative links nationally and internationally. Without some public support, individual enterprises, particularly small ones, would not have the resources to provide these services. These companies specifically warrant some public support and provision. The marketing and development of inter-regional collaborative links by the City, the University and MMV, is important for the same reasons. A final issue, and one that emerged from the consultation process, is the linking of these activities to the needs of the ICT cluster. Regular forums and industry consultation exercises are required to link these dimensions of infrastructure with local requirements.
Improved infrastructure will underpin the growth of ICT in Ballarat. But it is a necessary and not sufficient part of the strategy. To achieve the vision, Ballarat will need to complement the infrastructure with a range of other measures.
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