NICTA Showcases Best Practices

19 June 2012

Think tank National ICT Australia is showcasing a series of "lighthouse" projects, sharing its best practices in big data with Asia through its network of commercial spin-off companies.

Terry Percival, director for broadband and digital economy at NICTA, was at CommunicAsia to talk about the center of excellence's best practices with data centers, adoption of cloud computing in government and consultancy services.

NICTA offers cloud tools and performance prediction tools for smaller organizations without huge IT departments looking at taking their IT systems to the cloud through a spin-off company called Yuruware.

Dr Percival is in charge of the Australian Center for Broadband Innovation, which is aimed at readying e-government solutions, including e-health and learning, for when communities come online with Australia's huge nationwide fiber project. The idea is to get communities ready with a set of best practices for taking advantage of high-speed data, rather than having them flounder and find solutions for themselves after the network comes online.

The best practices in its digital productivity showcase are applicable to many other nations as they look toward to a national high-speed network, such as as Singapore and Malaysia.

NICTA itself is a research organization that focuses on big data, national sensor networks, machine learning, cutting-edge data optimization, analytics and how they can be applied to big data held in communications networks and logistics supply chains.

Of course, theory is all very well, but what about interfacing with the real world?

For that, Dr Percival says he spends a lot of his time in implementation - sitting down with people and drawing up actual business models, comparing them against compliance rules, helping them understand their own business and showing people how they can be more efficient, even in the hallowed grounds of health care where resistance to change can be quite a challenge.

For more information, visit NICTA at CommunicAsia 2012, Booth BM2-04.