Digital Business insights: Poor old NSW

IN ANY of our ICT surveys over the last 13 years, when we gathered responses from across Australia, NSW was behind just about everybody else.

 

Certainly behind Victoria, which tends to come first in Australia. Then ACT, Queensland and WA. Then SA, and then NSW.

At first I didn't think much about it, but the results became consistent. Every time we did a national survey, NSW was behind the others.

So I finally accepted the information and started wondering why.

I looked at the national RDA websites for further insights. There are 55 of these across the country and they reflect the interests of businesses and other organisations in each region. You can look at the projects in each region and when I did, it was clear that ICT wasn't of huge interest in much of NSW with the exception of Newcastle and the Hunter, Northern Rivers and Central Coast.

I asked others if they had noticed the same thing. Interestingly, many vendors in the ICT industry had noticed a similar difference across Australia.

Organisations in NSW and especially Sydney were harder to engage with.

I spoke to CSIRO about its experience with the Innovation Series luncheons. Same again. Melbourne and Brisbane were more interested in innovation, audiences came earlier and stayed later to network and share.

Sydney audiences were smaller, came late and left early.

Interesting.

Sydney of course has a lot of ICT companies headquartered there. Most of the multinationals have national or regional offices with primarily a sales function in Australia. So even though there are a lot of them in NSW, they don't do much innovation in house.

That is done by the small startups in ICT. And Sydney has a lot of those. It's not all bad.

So it isn't lack of innovation and ideas, the problem seems to be at a different level.

Leadership? Victoria has had a focus on ICT for many years, with at one stage an IT Minister and even a government department.

So some state governments take IT and its productivity potential seriously.

That is when I began to wonder if years and years of corruption in NSW State Government was having an impact on the way businesses within the state operated.

Was the insider dealing, and the "jobs for the boys" and "you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours" and "it's not what you know, it's who you know" culture making people distrustful, secretive and selfish?

If so, that would begin to explain why organisations in NSW were lagging behind organisations in other states in collaboration, sharing and networking.

They simply didn't trust their government and that attitude had rubbed off onto other organisations and everything else.

In our research, NSW was behind other states not just in adoption and use of ICT, but in the more economically valuable territory of collaboration, cooperation and sharing at the local and regional level.

If people don't trust their governments, politicians, political parties, unions and leaders, then they simply refuse to engage. They don't see any point.

Unfortunately, this very reasonable, defensive attitude then becomes a barrier to new opportunity.

Because, the underlying currents of the digital revolution continue to connect things up, and encourage collaboration, cooperation and sharing.

And the currency is trust.

These are the all powerful tools for building economic strength, regional business collaboration and cultural value.

Just not in NSW. And especially not in Sydney.

Newcastle and the Hunter are different. And Northern NSW is much more collaborative.

Maybe when the current set of corruption enquiries is over, and when a few people have been sent to jail, then people might begin to believe things have finally changed.

It doesn't take much either way.

Across the planet we can see a clash of old and new world interests and attitudes promoted by the general thrust towards more access to information and the sharing of information. Google has let the genie out of the bottle. Wikileaks and Edward Snowden have fed it.

There is more transparency than ever before and far easier access to sources of information and insights. It is harder to tell lies and get away with it. Ask Christopher Pyne if that isn't the case.

The NSA has recently been pushed onto centre stage, into a bright spotlight of condemnation and universal concern. A by-product of that attention is a sharp drop in sales across the BRIC nations of Cisco products and services.

Countries and companies are quite reasonably asking questions about privacy and security and wondering who to trust. That concern is now being focused on all American ICT companies and services and inevitably will affect strategies and sales for many years to come. Possibly permanently.

Trust is an ephemeral thing. Hard to built up, easy to destroy. And the current government and judiciary in NSW have a problem on their hands.

Trust has gone. And distrust seems to be impacting the state at a largely hidden, fundamental level, affecting the attitude of businesses and organisations that operate there. Not a good thing. It's actually holding the state back from leveraging many of the benefits of the digital revolution.

Because nearly all of them rely on trust.

And without it there is only so far and so fast one can go.

- John Sheridan, December 2013.

John Sheridan is CEO of Digital Business insights, an organisation based in Brisbane, Australia, which focuses on helping organisations and communities adapt to, and flourish in, the new digital world. He is the author of Connecting the Dots and getting more out of the digital revolution. Digital Business insights has been researching and analysing the digital revolution for more than 12 years and has surveyed more than 50,000 businesses, conducting in-depth case study analysis on more than 350 organisations and digital entrepreneurs.

http://www.db-insights.com/

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