Caldwell, the head of Gartner's knowledge management practice, told delegates to the technology company's symposium in Sydney yesterday the fledgling nature of technology policy and legislation, relative to those governing other aspects of business, meant there would be a great deal of uncertainty for many years to come.
Caldwell predicted that within two years more than half of the regulations governing e-commerce transactions would be new or modified in more than half of OECD countries. These regulations will often contradict each other, according to Caldwell, with the IT strategies espoused by governments conflicting through to the year 2007.
Another of Caldwell's predictions is there will be no substantial progress in crafting a treaty to protect intellectual property and individual rights relating to IT by 2010.
Caldwell recommended that companies create a 'weather bureau' for IT, which would be charged with the acquisition, assessment and analysis of information on consumer and regulatory trends. This would be used to evaluate the policies of the company.
"You need to have some way of monitoring that legislation, and hopefully have some way of shaping it," Caldwell told ZDNet Australia . "If you don't watch the bills and regulations as they're being developed it's hard to come back later and change it."
Caldwell declined to directly answer the question of which IT-relevant policy areas will undergo the most significant transformation in the next few years, pointing out the significant differences between countries and regions in terms of technological infrastructure and the nature of the political and economic system. So, what may be best practice in one country may not be transferable to another country, he said.
When questioned on his opinion on Australian regulations, Caldwell replied, "I though some of the copyright laws were a little odd regarding e-mail, but they're unenforceable anyway. How many unenforceable laws are you going to pass? The more unenforceable laws you have the less respect for the other laws there is."
What else do you expect from the current extremely conservative regime?
They never act, just react. And that reaction is always a knee-jerk reaction, taking further and broader steps to limit anyhting that happens to be the trndy issue at the time.
Honestly, if an alien landed in my backyard and said "Take me to your leader", and i showed him Johnny, the response would be "No, seriously, take me to your leader."