Phase Two

Note

Through to 2030

As we look to 2030, a number of trends will accelerate:

Maturing of the industry will lead to the further development of dominant standards and increased inter-operability in the ICT environment. Increasingly innovation will be tied to established trajectories and the scope for radical innovation will diminish.
This 'dominant design' and standardisation phase will mean greater industry consolidation. The ICT industry will consist of a few giants and a large number of agile suppliers and ancillary firms. The pursuit of cost reduction by the giants will increasingly lead them to low labour cost locations.
At a product level, computing will become increasingly invisible and embedded in applications. The distinction between ICT innovation and innovation in application industries will narrow. The flow of new ICT businesses will slow and be replaced with new business starts around application.
Worker individualisation through the ability to work independently from many locations, will accelerate. The growth of integrated mobile devices will compound this trend.
Government transparency will increase with mobile and online access to processes of governance at all levels in the public sector.
The generational shift will be complete; ICT will start to create new social and business environments, rather than ones that layer technology over existing systems and structures.
Some of the 'emerging' economies will overtake many of the 'developed' economies, not only in GDP, but in innovation and research.
Some of the new technologies identified earlier will be commercialised and start to change the scope of ICT applications;
The Semantic Web will embed knowledge processing in new applications.
Advances in flash technology will facilitate the personal archiving of all records, music, video, photographs, etc. Alternatively, as in Korea, high broadband speeds will mean that users will just download their materials, wherever they are, placing a greater emphasis on central storage facilities.
The ability to extract knowledge from data and make sense of large quantities of data will affect sources of knowledge and what we are able to learn about our social and business groups.

The strategy to deal with this less turbulent but very new environment will mean:

Infrastructure will be even more important; without super-fast broadband Ballarat will not compete globally.
Worker individualisation will be a major feature of the new competitive environment and will require appropriate infrastructure.
Monitoring, understanding and where appropriate facilitating the adoption of new technology will be critical.
The integration of ICT with other dominant local industries will increase in importance. Application of ICT to many mature industries will transform the potential competitiveness of those industries.
Participation in a networked knowledge environment will ensure that we have the required capacity to sense, understand and better manage our environment, collective health and governance.
Investment in Semantic Web and intelligent systems research and development at the University will facilitate its adoption in the region.
Continued development of international linkages will provide impetus to a dynamic 'intelligent applications' cluster.
Increased support for new businesses and training should be accelerated as the connected world will also provide greater scope for outsourcing and independent contracting into organisations.
Accelerate investment in research, research collaborations and knowledge accessing partnerships.