IfG.CC - The Potsdam eGovernment Competence Center

The Australian Government has announced a grant of nearly 1.4 million AUD (around 1 million USD) for four Vietnamese high-tech application projects in the field of digital transformation, through the Aus4Innovation Programme.

The funding is made within the framework of the Innovation Partnership Grants under the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s Aus4Innovation Programme in cooperation with the Ministry of Science and Technology of Vietnam.

REGIONAL and rural health services could fall further behind big cities without urgent action, a new Australian Medical Association report warns.

The AMA released its Position Statement on Better Access to High Speed Broadband for Rural and Remote Health Care on Friday.

It calls on the Government to improve internet access and affordability across the nation.

While yesterday's game changing announcement has been largely welcomed by the communications and content industries, the revamped strategy will add at least another year to the eventual deployment of high speed broadband services in Australia. With the build time slated for eight years and another onerous vendor RFP to be issued the overall timeline has been pushed out by at least 12 months.

Let me make this clear: if we don’t smarten up, Australia’s single biggest competitive advantage post the mining boom – high speed, ubiquitous broadband – could soon be our single biggest threat.

As technological progress continues at relentless speed, Australia needs to get serious about leveraging the opportunities ubiquitous broadband offers before the rest of the world starts using our infrastructure to deliver their smart innovations directly to our market.

The computers which cost over GH¢41,000, have in-built activation mechanisms to withstand power interruption and also have high speed internet connection.

A $5 million telehealth project aims to enhance delivery of mental health care in South Australia. The project, announced today, is funded by the Commonwealth and the South Australian government under the $20 million digital regions initiative.

The mental health project includes more than 100 new videoconferencing units to upgrade call and image quality for more than 80 sites around the state, the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy said. The project aims to reduce patient travel time, enable online access to health services, connect patients with family members living far away and “deliver rount the clock emergency triage and liaison services,” the department said.

One of the painfully slow after-effects of the Black Saturday bushfires has been to rebuild all of the vital community information that was lost, including the medical records of all the patients at the Marysville Medical Clinic, now located in Buxton.

Smart cities are here, and they are getting smarter by the day with the support 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.

As the roll out of 5G infrastructure continues across Australia, there is a growing opportunity for councils to develop smart city strategies that leverage the 5G network to expand the usage of data, sensors, and other smart devices to improve city operations and, ultimately, the lives of citizens.

Australia’s National Blood Authority saves A$10m as mobile and data innovations inject efficiency into the supply chain

Few organisations invest heavily in IT to make sure their clients use less of their product, but that’s the battle Australia’s National Blood Authority (NBA) is fighting – and winning – as it leans heavily on data and mobile technology innovations to optimise a real-time supply chain that involves most of Australia’s more than 1,300 hospitals.

On Monday morning we hosted a parliamentary delegation on transport safety and in the afternoon welcomed a senior leadership group from the NSW Police.

On Tuesday morning we scoped a data analytics project with a major telco and a large logistics company.

Roxon told journalists at a press conference in Sydney yesterday (see video above) that the project would see Australians access their electronic health record online through a system run by Medicare.

“The easiest way to think of it is how you access your bank details online,” she said.

This innovation is a breakaway from traditional thinking of how lighting poles are constructed. It's a change in form & function, totally transforming the pole This is a smart and elegant design with multi-function capability. The design's modularity and potential for customisation are very strong features as is the capacity to hide all wiring internally.” — The Good Design Awards Jury

‘iCore® Smart IoT Urban Pole’ and ‘iCore® Smart IoT Street Pole’ Recognised in Australia’s International Good Design Awards for Design Excellence.

In his report published today, Ovum's Dr Steve Hodgkinson, Research Director for Asia-Pacific IT research, says the survey of 63 CIOs completed before the third SE-Corp CIO Strategy Summit in Melbourne in February, reveals that “despite media hype to the contrary, ICT remains predominantly an in-house affair for Australian CIOs.”

ICT spending by the Australia healthcare industry is currently dominated by investments in telecommunications and hardware, accounting for 33.5% and 31.8% of healthcare industry spending on ICT in 2013 respectively. However, both telecommunications and hardware are expected to show negative CAGRs over the forecast period, in part reflecting the pattern in overall market growth for the telecommunications and hardware technology segments, but also reflecting the maturity of the healthcare ICT market in Australia, where the infrastructural investments have already been made.

Beyond the politics, it is worth taking a moment to reflect that ICT has certainly come a long way from its earlier backroom geeky image. These days, the Australian community is quite comfortable about having a grown-up discussion about broadband speeds and coverage, and no political party can afford to be caught unprepared on key technology issues.

In the post-election carve-up, both sides of politics have assigned experienced ministers to lead the charge on communications policy, and both have nominated broadband as one of the key battlegrounds for winning or retaining government.

Rolling out a state-wide electronic health record system is no mean feat for the CIO of SA Health, David Johnston. The government organisation last month switched on enterprise patient administration system (EPAS) that is set to transform 12 hospitals across South Australia.

“This would be the largest IT-enabled project that the state has ever undertaken,” Johnston told CIO Australia. “It’s a significant initiative because it means that if it works here then it’s completely applicable to other states or countries, other jurisdictions.

Dr Sandra Haukka, from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI) at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), said seniors, particularly pensioners, risked being left behind as businesses and governments shifted more services to the web.

"With the government and private sector spending billions on the National Broadband Network, we have to make sure that the internet can be used by all those who need it the most," she said.

During the initial wave of digital-transformation efforts, Australia developed an international reputation as an early leader. That peaked in around 1999.

While the different tiers of government (local, state and federal) and individual agencies have developed some impressive e-government platforms, a joined-up approach to e-government has so far remained elusive.