Any hopes that the government will legislate against offshoring have been dashed. According to Durie, the AIIA does not believe the government should create legislation preventing the public and private sectors from sending development work overseas.
"Offshoring will be part of the landscape, there is no point trying to figure out ways to get around it," said Durie. "I don't think legislation would work."
Durie believes offshoring will have a major impact on the Australian software development industry during the next three to five years, predicting prices from local developers will drop as they try to stay competitive. In order to succeed, he says, local companies must move up the value chain and ease away from competing purely on cost.
"It's about quality, we are highly regarded for our innovative approach to development, but we need to balance that with quality--I am not saying that our developers' work isn't of good quality, instead that they need to make it a promotional marketing tool," he says.
Durie said he had not yet met with Daryl Williams since the latter was awarded the post of Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, but a face-to-face discussion is planned for early December.
Another topic on that meeting's agenda will be future of the Building on IT Strengths (BITS) program, which was designed to help build the Australian technology industry and provide support for local innovators by providing financial assistance for incubators.
Launched at the same time as the dot-com bust in mid-2000 -- which Durie said was possibly the worst time for such an initiative to be launched--with AU$158 million in funding over five years, BITS' future remains uncertain. The federal government has received a report from Allen Consulting on BITS but is yet to release the results. The AIIA is pushing for an early answer, afraid if the answer doesn't come until next year there may be no incubators left to continue in the program.
The oxymoronically named Australian Information industries Association (AIIA) is controlled by mostly foreign firms. They care nothing for what happens to local IT firms and local IT staff.
I await the time when Open Source makes such two-faced organisations superfluous.