Last week I had the occasion to deliver a keynote opening address to a number of leading Milan based entrepreneurs who were in Malta to attend an international conference organised by the Malta Institute of Management.

In my presentation I elaborated on the salient points of Labour’s ICT strategy as originally drafted in August 2006, and formally approved by party structures a few months later.

The main thrust of Labour’s ICT strategy is the following:

Since a year and a half ago, we had come up with the idea of promoting Malta as ‘an intelligent island,’ to help it carry out the quantum leap from an information society to a knowledge based and knowledge driven economy. Since two summers ago we came up with the idea of branding Malta in ICT, in order to entrench the basic principles of best practice when it comes to the highest efficiency standards and optimal quality assurance.

We are making it clear to one and all that Malta should strive for a bi-partisan approach in the ICT sector, as we have done successfully over the years in financial services and maritime affairs.

A new Labour government will not try to reinvent the wheel, in order to ensure a fair measure of continuity and build on the positives achieved so far, but, once elected, we must not only consolidate current achievements, but also forcibly address current deficiencies and weaknesses.

We also need to carry out an economic assessment of the present and future role and effect of ICTs in our economy.

This can only be achieved if a structured SWOT analysis is carried out, and a clear cut demarcation line drawn to eliminate a curious ambivalence between the perceived role of government and the private sector.

While Malta has done remarkably well in the e-government sector, we need to increase our spending on R & D as a percentage of GDP, step up employment in Knowledge Intensive Services sectors, increase Broadband access, address the generation gap in the regular use of the Internet and also start using our country as a potentially ideal test bed for many technological innovations – especially in the mobile sector.

The government needs to work in partnership with the ICT industry to deliver innovative business solutions and better services, both locally and internationally.

While government has a pivotal role to play in transforming the information society into a knowledge driven economy, we believe that the key role should be performed by the private sector, with government itself acting as a catalyst and facilitator.

It needs to create a climate for managing technological change, but ultimately it should be up to the stakeholders themselves to initiate and carry out this change themselves.

Once this government has embarked on the SmartCity Malta project, which we voted for unanimously in Parliament, we are committed to ensuring that the project benefits from a fast track approach, does not get bogged down in bureaucratic delays, and, to use the words of our official document, to also ‘increase the current momentum of the project.’

Although government has its ICT arm – MITTS, which has a pivotal role to play as the provider for Government systems in strategic business areas, it should limit itself only to those that are of utmost sensitivity, particularly from a high security aspect.

We are committed to embarking on a nation wide programme to outsource the complete replacement of non-strategic legacy applications to the corporate sector.

In the education sector, not only did we propose wider scale applications of e-learning and distance learning – re ICT – a year and a half ago, but also outreach programmes to help civil servants and public sector employees become more IT oriented.

We are seriously looking at the possibility of creating a research based area of tertiary education specialisation that would be in line with addressing current deficiencies in the R & D and innovation sectors.

Apart from enabling the ICT business industry to attract local and foreign investment, we also want to encourage Maltese ICT companies to look beyond our shores right across the Mediterranean, but with particular emphasis on the Maghreb.

While supporting vertical strategic alliances we should quantify a priori the tangible strategic advantages of their contribution to the economy, possibly by engaging them more in areas where we are still relatively weak – by boosting our R & D and innovation capability and infrastructure.

The same way that Malta made a name for itself as a centre of excellence for English Language schools for foreign students, a year and a half ago we proposed that we should try to do the same by encouraging foreign students to come to Malta to learn ICT the same way others do to familiarize themselves with the English language.

We shall also work alongside the ETC to proactively conduct continuous research on skill requirements by the ICT industry and following a gap analysis, develop a holistic ICT employment and training strategy.

We believe strongly in promoting a local software industry, but due to economies of scale we shall encourage such important players to also actively seek opportunities beyond our shores.

Leo Brincat is the opposition spokesman for Foreign Affairs & IT