IfG.CC -
Institute for eGovernment

These are some of the innovations experts expect to see in Australian homes by 2021, although there are already fears that, altogether, they'll require more speed than offered by current National Broadband Network plans.

For city planners, the great promise of a 5G network is the ability to deliver on the promises of smart cities. While much of the technology required for smart cities already exists, the capacity for the technology to operate in real time across an interconnected network has been held back by the current network standards.

However, analysts are tipping 5G will reduce these barriers and spur the development of more applications to enhance citizens’ lives.

The acceleration of digital transformation across industries because of the COVID pandemic and the rapid build-out and adoption of 5G is having a huge impact on the way that big business is planning for new market opportunities.

The response to the pandemic, with lockdowns and border closures, restricted travel and the impact on office work has generated a surge in planning for digitalisation and the creation of new business models.

Smart cities are here, and they are getting smarter by the day via the use of 5G.

5G is the fifth generation of mobile technology and next progression in mobile networks. The technology is designed to meet the continuing growth in data and connectivity in our society, including the Internet of Things (IoT) and tomorrow’s innovations.

Gartner predicts that by 2016, public cloud spending in Australia will reach US$5.2 billion. The analyst firm is forecasting that Australian spending on public cloud will reach US$3.2 billion this year, representing a growth rate in excess of 23 per cent. It puts Australia ahead of the global average of 18.5 per cent growth for 2013.

In Australia, public cloud has already found some outspoken proponents among large enterprises, including Commonwealth Bank CIO Michael Harte. Harte told a cloud computing event late last year that the bank had already saved "tens of millions of dollars" after implementing "small initiatives" that leveraged Amazon Web Services' cloud.

Ever since the Federal Government announced its plan to construct a National Broadband Network (NBN) much time and talk has been dedicated to the endless possibilities of the fibre network. In few sectors has this been more the case than healthcare.

Indeed, the potential for ultra-fast broadband to transform the health sector and make the electronic health, or e-health, a reality has often been touted as the raison d'être for the network.

Minister for Health and Ageing, Nicola Roxon, today told ABC Radio 612 Brisbane that the blueprint represents a "concept of operations" for the electronic health record system set to be made available to the general public in July next year.

"Any person who chooses to, from 1 July next year, will be able to be part of an electronic health system, and what that means is that important information about you can be accessed by you at any computer, and probably any iPhone and Blackberry, into the future, which will have your current medications, any particular allergies, information that you might want stored there about emergency contacts and others," said the minister.

From July of 2015, the Department of Immigration and Border Protection (DIBP) and the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service (ACBPS) will merge to become The Australian Border Force. This agency will focus solely on border operations, allowing officials to move resources from administrative duties to the front lines. Most importantly, it will allow officials to better integrate digital security solutions into our border processes.

Results from recent research conducted by Ovum details the experiences of five public sector organizations that have successfully deployed cloud services -- either with Infrastructure-as-Service (IaaS), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) or Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).

The transformation in the sector is being underpinned by four key drivers. Healthcare utilisation and healthcare financial models are evolving rapidly as patients change the way they choose to interact with healthcare providers. Combine those three factors with the unprecedented speed with which medical science is advancing; and you can see why IT professionals in the healthcare space need to be on their toes as healthcare providers adjust their IT strategies to meet market conditions.

With the fasting growing population among Australian capital cities, the leaders of Melbourne are committed to maintaining the city’s liveability. “We have a responsibility to preserve the city for the next generation, making sure that it’s an ideal place where people can live, work and play,” he said.

Across the country thousands of patients already have a personally controlled shared e-health record and last year 100,000 doctor's appointments were made using a new online booking system for medicos.

E-health is happening in the private sector but when the federal government's $1 billion Personally Controlled e-Health Record (PCEHR) system is launched tomorrow, it will be an empty vessel. No doctor will be able to use it and no X-rays or pathology results will be attached to it.

The South Australian government pledged not to start any more big ICT projects in the refreshed ICT strategy it launched late last year – a tempting proposal, but a tricky one to make a reality.

The man responsible for bridging the divide between rhetoric and day-to-day business is Bret Morris, a long-serving South Australian bureaucrat who took over the role of government CIO in December following the resignation of Andrew Mills.

To help identify and act on current and potential future public safety threats, smart city technology is a critical resource for leaders of city councils.

Modern safety applications, powered by Industrial IoT (IIoT) infrastructure, utilise correlated sensor data from devices like flood monitoring sensors, pole tilt sensors, traffic monitoring sensors and air quality devices to identify trends and predict imminent danger, enabling cities to respond more effectively to ensure community safety.

Developing a digital government strategy is a significant and complex challenge for public sector CIOs, but there are some steps you can follow, says Gartner research VP, Glenn Archer.

The process for developing an IT strategy is well understood and is generally seen as an important, if not essential, activity for most organisations and government entities. In contrast, the how and why of developing a digital strategy for government is far less understood.

These moves can largely be targeted at three positive outcomes: to use the information to manage risk and deliver successful projects more often, to bridge the knowledge gap with non-ICT management by offering project governance support and to raise the profile and demonstrate the value of ICT at the most senior level within the organisation and / or the Company Board.

Remember how strongly the medical community felt about having everyone's health data in a single database, just waiting to be stolen and used against them?

So the National E-health Transition Authority and co came up with a complex system that meant that any data would reside in individual repositories and be linked together via the identifier, only to be requested and used when required.

All tiers of governments around the developed world are embracing the smart city concept.

Digital technology is increasingly being harnessed to manage and optimise municipal services such as transportation, energy usage, waste disposal, and public safety.

But the smart city concept is anything but shiny and new. Its genesis can be traced back to the 1960s with the introduction of computerised traffic management systems. The groundwork for the smart city concept was laid further as technology evolved through the seventies to the nineties.

Dubbed as INSPIRE, the centre will facilitate research and promote ICT use among pre-service and practicing teachers.

It has received $2 million from the ACT Government and $5 million from the federal government.

According to the ACT Government, this research will in turn inform the design of professional learning for pre-service teachers at UC, as well as teachers across ACT public schools.

A council of Tasmanian ICT leaders will meet next month to reassess government approach to IT development in the financially troubled state, with expectations its members will focus heavily on economic advantages to be gained from the National Broadband Network (NBN) rollout there.

The $1 million digital futures fund, announced in August to direct the state’s digital economy, was one of few IT projects spared by the state’s treasury this week, which flagged $3.9 million worth of cuts to programs in industries such as e-health and education.