As the head of National ICT Australia, Dr Mel Slater faces one of the most difficult challenges in the Australian information and technology industries.
A former research chief for Motorola in the United States, Slater must bring together a group of partners including the NSW and ACT governments, the Australian National University and the University of NSW, with the support of other academic and commercial partners, to create an ICT Centre of Excellence with an operating budget of AU$1.1 billion over 10 years. In doing so he treads a narrow path between the expectations of those involved.
What was it that attracted you to this role?
"This is one of the most exciting opportunities that I've ever heard of. And I think we've got a chance to win - it's winning that always excites you. The political figures, the technology figures, the educators, the researchers, and the business community all want to do the same thing. Now there's always infighting among communities, but the experience I've had to now leads me to believe that the infighting leads to pretty constructive discussions, and the constructive discussions always keep the end goal in mind. And it appears that there is a real opportunity to succeed because the end goal is so attractive to everyone that they are willing to back off their individual domain ambitions for a while to help the main goal happen."
Describe the end goal for NICTA:
"The end goal is to enrich the Australian economy with businesses that can help with the balance of payments, help with employment, and help information and communication technology businesses to claim a larger percentage of the gross national product of Australia.
"To do that you need to do a few things. You need to increase the amount of the raw materials - people and ideas. NICTA is looking to work with the education institutions to examine the information and communication programs at the graduate level, and enrich them and make them competitive to all other institutions on a worldwide basis. And that's doable. If you do that you are also going to generate more ideas.
"The next step is to create a pipeline. That is, how do you take these raw ideas and raw material and inject it into the economy. Well, you need to look to see if everything is there that is needed to make it easy for someone to take an idea and turn it into a business. Well, I don't know that answer to that, but I suspect that it's not there, because the partners have indicated that it is a problem. Now there are places in the world that have an infrastructure in place so that if you have an idea you can be up and running in days. I suspect that here if you have an idea, the process of getting money and of getting a place and getting it equipped, can take a year. And in a competitive market that's not a good thing.
"And then we need to develop a receptor community. When someone has an idea, you need to have a group of people who are willing to grab on to those and lead it to market."
What do you see as being the most significant challenge that you face in pushing NICTA forward?
"I'm finding out that there are a lot of disconnects in terms of what people expect. When you talk about this program to different people, the impressions that people have are very, very different. I think if I speak with enough people and get enough views I may be able to get it to all come together. And one of the key challenges for me is getting all of the disconnects to blend and work together, because in a way they are all right. Every one of them that has a point of view based in their own interest or as they see things... none of these issues are one dimensional. So I'm trying really hard to understand different points of view. But there's so much to be done, it doesn't mean we do one at the exclusion of the other. Making sure that we communicate the way we are going to resolve those disconnects clearly is going to be an important issue in making certain that those supporters that we have for the program remain supporters."
One point of discussion to emerge already is potential conflict between the desire of researchers to engage in long-term projects versus the need to get economic benefits from introducing new technologies into the marketplace and industry. How will you balance this?
"On the one hand we can't deny the importance of long term research - if we don't indicate that we really believe in and support long term research our ability to attract top notch world class researchers is going to be injured. But we can't really be putting together an operation such as Bell Labs, which has a 15 year gestation period. That really won't satisfy our partners, and even the people of Australia.
"And on the other hand we need to have a process where we are continually culling the best ideas that we can, and transferring those into solutions that inject world-class elements into the Australian economy. That means a process where we are not necessarily waiting for things to reach eureka stage, but taking incremental ideas to market that people are willing to pay for.
"And sometimes you can get a little lucky. Some of these researchers didn't just start working on ideas in the last month, some of them have been working on ideas for years. And it may well be that by bringing in the right sort of commercialisation support we can help them to realise that many of the ideas they have already developed are things that people may in fact want and be willing to pay for.
When and how can the Australian public expect to start assessing whether NICTA has been successful?
-I'm not sure that the general public is going to evaluate NICTA on its research success or the strength of its research programs. I believe that the general public - and probably the press - are going to evaluate NICTA based on our ability to add strength to the ICT industry within Australia. To put together a quantifiable measure within the next few years is going to be very, very difficult, but we can create a perception that we're really gaining strength. And as we develop people and ideas and begin to inject both into Australia's ICT economy and into Australia's business community the success stories will begin to appear. And as that happens the perceptions that develop will be an indicator of truth. To see something measurable, that would be getting enough of our first wave of researchers out there, and getting enough of our first wave of businesses out there to be measurable will take somewhere in the order of five years."
Are there any specific areas of information technology where you think NICTA should be focusing its efforts:
"What I'm looking for is what can be the big win. I ask people how many had used a cell phone in 1985, or how many people used e-mail in 1993, or the internet in 1997. These are thing that have changed people's lives. So what thing is going to change our lives in 2010? And the way I look at it, unless it's going to be a major breakthrough in thinking, it's probably going to solve a problem that really irritates people. So I ask myself, 'What irritates me?' Well, I don't like to wait in lines. When I go into theatre, I'd like to have my communicator be able to communicate directly with the server in the theatre, and take money out of my account, assign my tickets on my display, and I go and sit down. When I go into a hotel, I don't want to other the person behind the counter. The same thing for an airplane. The ability to not have to wait in line would have a tremendous convenience for me. We're in the infancy of information and communication technology. As far as we think we've come, we have a long way to go. In the next 10 or 20 years we're going to be doing things that we're not even thinking about today. And that's exciting. And if we can get there first in Australia, there's a lot of money to be made."
