A survey of delegates to a conference in Queensland last weekend showed that Australia still lags the US in confidence about electronic commerce, and about the speed and secuirty of the Internet.
John McCarthy, group director of research of Forrester Research, conducted
the survey after his keynote speech on transactive content at the Open
Systems Forum, the annual networking conference held by systems integrator
Com Tech at Coolum, Queensland.
The survey included around 180 customers of Com Tech, comprising network
managers and CIOs from some of Australia’s largest enterprises.
They responded that lack of co-ordination between departments was the
biggest challenge in implementing an Internet commerce strategy, with 41
percent of the vote.
Lack of management support was next at 23 percent, followed by funding woes
(13), shortfalls in customer demand (12) and technology hurdles (11).
On the question of the perceptions of the Internet’s speed, 69 percent of
delegates responded that it was too slow, 24 said it was “just OK”, and
eight percent maintained it was fast enough or very fast.
This differs markedly from a similar survey conducted by Forrester at a
forum held in Chicago earlier this year, in which only 33 percent
disparaged the Net as too slow, 51 percent said it was OK, and 16 percent
called it fast.
This division was echoed in a question about security. 73 percent of
Australian delegates said the Net was not secure, 26 percent said it was
secure enough, and only one of the 174 polled said it was very secure.
In contrast, only 40 percent of the Chicago attendees said the Net was not
secure, with 55 percent declaring it safe and five percent going so far as
to say it was very secure.
One bright point was that 65 percent of Com Tech respondents said they
would be spending more than half a million Australian dollars (US$292,000)
on Internet initiatives in 2000, more than doubling the figure of 31
percent for the current year.