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How do we measure success?
21 Dec 2008
How do we measure the vitality and vibrancy and the performance of our digital economy? Is it realising the potential of new opportunities opened up by advancing technology? Are there barriers that confront some sectors of our economy in the use of online technologies? Digital economy metrics can help us answer these questions.
But what metric, and what corresponding benchmark? There is a range of metrics each with their drawbacks and benefits.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) provides several sets of metrics describing how Australian firms are engaging in the digital economy. These metrics track the diffusion of technologies such as internet, broadband, web presence and online sales and purchases. They are broken down by firm size and industry. However, their use is far from simple. On individual metrics Australias position is varied. From the ABS' latest (2005-06) Business use of IT (tables 5.1 and 5.2):
- Our broadband uptake is increasing. Our 89.7 per cent access leads the UK and EU average by more than 10 percentage points.
- We are average for the internet. Our 93.5 per cent access is marginally above the UK's 93.4 per cent and the EU average of 93.2 per cent.
- We lag in web presence—we are 24th of the 29 countries. Our 54.8 per cent participation rate is over 30 percentage points behind the leaders, 20 points behind the UK and 9 points behind the EU average. This raises issues given our high ranking in broadband access.
- The e-business metrics suggest Australia is a leader. Table 5.2 shows we rank highly in the percentages of business using the internet to receive orders (we ranked 5th out of 27 countries) or to place orders (we ranked 7th).
These datapoints could be misleading. Firstly, the ABS data excludes firms with fewer than 10 employees; secondly, some countries are excluded (e.g. USA, Singapore, India and China); and thirdly, the surveys' years and methodologies differ.
Moreover, other research suggests we may lag significantly in e-commerce. For example, one source recently reported that online sales for Australian department stores account for only 2.1 per cent of revenue compared with about 6.5 per cent in the UK and about 7.9 per cent in the USA. So might some Australians sectors be really lagging overseas competitors? Or are such comparisons merely a statistical mirage?
Might some of our industries be falling behind their overseas counterparts? If so, which ones, and why? Does it matter? Can metrics help promote our digital economy?
Comments (17)
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Another way of measuring success is to see if the Government understands how to have a debate.
In this case the Government sets up a "blog" and then fails to allow responses to its comments.
Unfortunately this will result in people placing their responses wherever they can. It's not going to be pretty.
Conroy states: "Technology is improving all the time. Technology that filters peer-to-peer and BitTorrent traffic does exist and it is anticipated that the effectiveness of this will be tested in the live pilot trial."
I really hope he doesn't believe that bittorrent and p2p are all bad. My company uses bittorrent to do p2p distributed backup. We would be *really* pissed off if he decided it was a universally bad thing. We'd probably just change ports and/or encrypt it and that would get around his filter anyway.
Posted by Steve / 23 Dec 2008 9:17am / Permalink
This is too easy.
When I have fibre running down my street, and I can get 100Mps uncapped for less than $50, from a variety of providers (none of which are beholden to any owner of infrastructure), then it will be obvious to everyone that we've succeeded.
Access, speed, price, volume, industry reform - those are the areas of concern, fix those and everything else will sort itself out.
When it comes to the internet, the network is everything - businesses aren't going to invest in internet presence if they, and their customers, are restricted by it. Why bother making rich applications if the communication to the client is like ramming a camel through the eye of a needle.
If you want people on the internet - then make it bigger, faster and cheaper. Everyone owns a mobile phone - think about why that is - the paradigm is the same.
Posted by Stuart Anderson / 23 Dec 2008 1:09am / Permalink
In government and parliament success is commonly measured by the how representative and responsible the acts are to the majority of the people. You can measure success of an implementation by government or parliament through an evaluation of public acceptance...
Has anyone seen a shade of acceptance for the clean feed?
Posted by Bourkster / 22 Dec 2008 8:48pm / Permalink
How do you measure failure? Implement an ISP filter!
Posted by Steve / 22 Dec 2008 4:09pm / Permalink
@ Alan in Sydney. I agree that the Department doesn't get blogging. The Minister isued a more traditional consultation document on this stuf. Guess what? It looked just like the posts here - all they did to "create" the "blog" is cut up the discussion paper.
Bizarrely though the discussion paper is in a different order.
The discussion paper also doesn't really discuss filtering, in fact, it explicitly excludes it from the process. That is actually OK. If I'm asking you if you prefer red or green and you reply purple, it's your fault not mine.
Posted by Verity Pravda / 22 Dec 2008 2:46pm / Permalink
Quote from Lindsay Tanner's Welcome Blog: "We are also genuine about wanting to use online consultation to improve government-citizen relationships around public policy. We want real outcomes from online consultation, not a new channel to distribute a press release." -Today's blog closely resembles a press release, with slightly less spin than usual, but more importantly --------------Clearly the Department and Minister Conroy have proven that they will not heed the advice of industry experts, how are we to believe that they will take any notice of our comments?
Posted by Choked / 22 Dec 2008 1:55pm / Permalink
19/12/2008 "Yes, we know you want to talk about filtering and we will be posting about it on Monday..."
Its Monday (1:53pm AEDT) yet no post. One measure of success would be succeeding in posting when you claim to. Another measure of success would be to not attempt to hide the most important topic of note in the one week guaranteed to have most professional people absent from their normal work environment, and therefore less likely to comment on it.
As for less topical measures, succes would be in having the government actually re-regulate the company it created without any controls, any guarantees of service, and without any idea of what it was doing.
Telstra was given a packaged infrastructure as well as a retail arm. The retail is fine if a little (read: a lot) overpriced, but the infrastructure arm should never have been given over to a profit earning organisation. Make it an NPO who's requirement is to maintain, upgrade and expand the infrastructure coverage, while selling data equally to all buyers. Maybe you could make that your new broadband project instead of just throwing a few billion out to tender and hoping for the best. Success could then be measured by services for the bush, general access, fast service connection times (1 day not 2 weeks), high speed open access to the internet....
Oh wait, success is apparently measured by how much political spin can be garnered from quaking parents who don't know any better than the govt about what will or won't protect their children.
"Are there barriers that confront some sectors of our economy in the use of online technologies?"... Some but the worst is yet to come.
Posted by Brent / 22 Dec 2008 1:53pm / Permalink
Success means no more monoply in the last loop.
Success means no filtering. Success means no more $70+ per month for low limited monthly downloads.
Success means the 512mb download speed is NOT considered broadband.
Success means regional coverage every bit as good as city coverage for both 3G and wired broadband.
Success means that someone in governemtn and public services "gets" the online community.
Success means that sites like this wouldn't need to exist.
Success means that government websites would be vibrant, active, current and searchable.
Success means my kids are already fluent in computer usage and touch-typing before finishing primary school.
Posted by Chaps / 22 Dec 2008 12:50pm / Permalink
Judging by the rate of commenting to this post, you need to learn how to engage with the online community. Thought of the day posts do not seem to be cutting it.
Posted by Alan in Sydney / 22 Dec 2008 12:21pm / Permalink
To measure success you need to measure something that has real meaning, not something that sounds good.
For example, if one was designing a filter for the internet you would not define success in a way that allowed it to be deemed successful if it was easy to circumvent, or if false positives occurred more often than false negatives (in absolute terms), or if it massively slowed down internet access, or was used to block legal content.
Since the Government has virtually conceded all of these points and it still appears intent on going forward with the filter regardless, I have little hope that this request for input is anything other than an attempt to pay lip service to the online community.
As a counter example, if the intent of the Government was to alienate the online community, the proposal to filter the internet seems to have been completely successful. I wonder if the minister has noticed this yet?
Posted by Steve / 22 Dec 2008 9:19am / Permalink
I think the main problem with those statistics is that Australia is a very unique place ethnicity and population-wise. The millions of international students that use the internet (I'd guess) 10 times more when it comes to daily time spent online already change the numbers significantly. Australia only has 21 mio residents and so many temporary ppl that have to use the internet to stay connected with their folks overseas. It would be interested to know how many "real" Australians use the internet regularly - including regional areas. I'm sure they statistics would be much, much worse. Coming from Germany, Australia feels about 5 years behind Germany and 8 years behind the US in that industry. No surprise to me. I'm paying AUD $70 per month for my DSL connection which would cost me about 15 Euros in Germany.
Posted by Kai / 22 Dec 2008 8:50am / Permalink
It really does you no credit to quote part of an article from The Australian showing statistics on online sales without showing the reason they gave for our online sales being lower than overseas ie."The major factor limiting acceptance of the internet and online orders is the inability to actually touch the product, high mailing costs and the lack of competitive prices." The use of the internet for sales is basicly about advertising. This means reaching the largest possible targeted market (Heard of cookies??) and giving them the chance to aquire the product while they are still salivating. Metrics like all statistics are a measure of history. As Rhett said "Quite frankly my dear - Who gives a dam" We need to be concentrating on the future. We are talking about an environment that is changing faster than the majority of people or enterprizes can comprehend. In case you are not aware of the way the Internet is developing - a 2006 report is as uptodate as the dead sea scrolls. What is with the Sunday post. trying to be unnoticed?
Posted by Brownbear / 21 Dec 2008 7:47pm / Permalink
This is something that's bothered me about Conroy's department, particularly with regard to the proposed filter. We're told there's to be a "live trial", yet the measures that indicate success aren't publicised. So in effect, we'll end up with "success" regardless of the actual results. This is what happened in the last "trial" -- most independent observers would consider it a failure. It didn't block effectively. It caused performance degradation. Yet Conroy cherry-picked a couple of metrics: one filter was effective (didn't mention it was very slow), one filter was very fast (didn't mention it didn't block effectively). So I'm all for metrics. But can we decide what we consider to be success before we get there please?
Posted by Simon Rumble / 21 Dec 2008 1:27pm / Permalink
he main criteria for successfully is by measuring govt involvement. If a govt censors the internet it is not judged to be free and therefore a failure
Posted by Cynic / 21 Dec 2008 11:42am / Permalink
Okay, I'll try one more time, although all these posts are really proving is how little you understand about blogging. Blogging is a dialogue. You need to be answering comments, not posting the thought of the day in language dense with complicated phrases and devoid of any actual content. The evidence of this blog is that the showstopper issue is the filter. The expression 'showstopper' means an issue that must be solved before other can be addressed. If you proceed with the filter you will endanger children in 2 ways. The traffic in child pornography will continue unchanged, but many assume it has been resolved. Families will be less likely to install point-of=use filters and less to closely supervise their children online. One way you could actually engage in dialogue would be to address the fact that most child pornography is not transmitted by HTTP and HTTP is the only protocol the filter can touch. Moreover an automatic filter is basically down to testing for particular words and phrases. That is a recipe for disaster. First it is extraordinarily easy to circumvent, second it leads to problems such as Britain's recent experience with banning Wikipedia and earlier experiences where researchers in breast cancer, for instance, found they were being blacklisted for using a word denoting the object of their research, Knowing that the filter will not touch nonHTTP traffic, why are you gung-ho for the filter?
Posted by Alan in Sydney / 21 Dec 2008 11:38am / Permalink
So by measures for success it would seem that the most successful method of stopping child abuse is traditional policing, as opposed to a filter more suited to blocking content "unwanted" by the government and minority agendas. Like the Chinese have in place and the Labor party is forcing through even though it will not succeed in it's stated intention.
Posted by Stainless Steel Rat / 21 Dec 2008 11:18am / Permalink
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Another way of measuring success is to have a trial that will allow people to demonstrate how they would get around the filter.
Conroy states: "However, this trial did not address all of the technical questions that need consideration prior to the introduction of ISP filtering. In particular, the results of the laboratory trial may differ in a real-world environment. This is why the Government is proceeding with a further, real-world 'live' pilot."
It would be a remarkably good idea for the minister for censorship to set up a single page in the .gov domain and have it blocked by his trial filter. This filtered site could be publicized allowing people who are filtered to try to get it. I'm sure that there will be many ways it could and would be done. It would help demonstrate the effectiveness of the filter against people who actually want to circumvent it (i.e. most school children) and may indicate what could be done to strengthen it. It might also show that it's not effective, but that's the risk you have to take if you set up a trial correctly.
I suspect that the minister will not allow this to be done as it will just add another layer of egg on his face as people find numerous ways around the filter.
Posted by Steve / 23 Dec 2008 9:37am / Permalink