The Information lift out section of today's Australian Financial Review  (AFR) had a number of stories which collectively are a sign of the times for ICT (Information and Communications Technology) in Australia.

The lead story is headed "Coonan puts in calls to the techs". It contains an interesting table listing 10 pre-election IT policy consultancy reports sought since 8 December 2006 by Minister Helen Coonan's Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts. The AFR describes them as a "shopping list for consultants and advisers to revamp IT policy".

The Government's shopping list of areas for ICT consultants to report on includes next generation networks, the future of the Internet, analysis of spectrum policy trends, and a telework awareness initiative. The item I find personally most immediately relevant is the Government's 8 February 2007 request for a report on "Online security for small business". I work with colleagues who specialise in this area. The Government wants to be seen to be helping small businesses cope with viruses, spam and Web defacement.

The ICT security challenge for organisations is indeed growing exponentially. Threats exist from both in-house and external snoopers, hackers, pharmers, spammers, scammers, virus-writers, and spies. The response requires legal, policy, technical and cultural solutions. A highly practical book I can recommend is by UK author Robert Schifreen titled Defeating the Hacker  (John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, West Sussex, 2006). I'll have more on this book in a future post or article.

Other sign of the times stories in today's Australian Financial Review were:

1. Telcos want a bigger piece of the Internet traffic dollar pie: TCP/IP co-inventor, Vint Cerf is telling telcos to take a hike in their US-expressed wish to charge Google, Yahoo! and ISPs for Internet traffic flow over their pipes. The story has this sentence: "Last week, Telstra admitted its fixed-line phone business was declining faster than expected. Revenue from Telstra's core fixed-line telephone business fell 7.6% in the first half of the year, a marked increase on the 3.4% decline in the 2005 financial year."
2. Take care with Creative Commons licences: Marketing guru, Seth Godin, is now happy. He was formerly steamed up according to the New York Times because he used a Creative Commons licence for his free 52-page book "Everyone's an Expert (About Something)" and found Book4you or BN Publishing selling it for US$9.99 and claiming it was "new" though it was written in 2005. This story particularly caught my eye as I've been a specialist in book publishing law since my career began in 1983 as the legal office at Angus & Robertson Publishers.
3. Digital Rights Management (DRM) spin: Tales aplenty on DRM (3 separate stories). MP3 players are everywhere and people want to know how to avoid the proprietary tricks which lock in or lock out users, eg DRM, unique software interfaces, and non-standard connector cables (forcing you to buy one for the home and one for work). I'll also be writing on DRM in more detail in a future post. Repeatedly over the last 100 years music, technical locks and law formed a virtuous circle or an evil trioka, it is a matter of perspective and business models. See for example a recent post titled  Music formats and law: commercialisation of 45-rpm records.
4. Knowledge management in a box (?): Google enterprise search boxes are selling fast according to the article titled "Australians lap up Google's enterprise".  They are computer server-style hardware products that mine corporate networks and databases. Globally there have been 8,000 units sold so far, up from 4,000 eight months ago. There are apparently 160 customers in Australia. Distributors include ChannelWorx, BearingPoint and Harris Technology. A Google Mini (pictured above) costs $5,000 and a Google Search Appliance $75,000. 

I wonder what level of investment is made annually by each of those who have bought the Google boxes in:

• training staff to maintain and build frameworks for organisational knowledge management?
• initiatives to inform staff on the alignment between organisational business functions?
• projects for better document management, including to improve document record making and keeping skills?
• house style manuals and other document preparation guides designed to make it easier, faster and cheaper to find information?

To my knowledge Dilanchian is the only law firm in the world which offers "knowledge management" as a major service field. We marry it with our commercialisation services.