It’s a well worn path. Once every two or three years, if you head an American IT giant, all roads lead to Canberra.
And so it was with Microsoft’s larger-than-life chief executive Steve Ballmer quietly slipped into Australia last week.
It was as low a profile visit to Australia as is possible for a Microsoft chief to make.
The IT press were unhappy that Ballmer wasn’t being made available for a press conference (nor the fact that they were locked out of an American Chamber of Commerce luncheon, among other events).
Microsoft’s PR tried hard to throw the media a bone, issuing a statement to say the company had signed a meaningless agreement with the Department of Defence.
Talk about slim pickings … the agreement was so meaningless that a parliamentary secretary was wheeled out to sign it. Good grief! Now that’s a sure-fire strategy for keeping the general media’s interest in the boss’s visit at sub-coma level.
Still, these visits are all about the private meetings – not the public ones. Ballmer met the Prime Minister, yawn (the PM has not been a supporter of this industry). And he met Kevin Rudd, presumably to talk about the latest polling data.
Much more interesting was news that the Microsoft chief met with Health Minister Tony Abbott and with a group of state Government chief information officers.
In the next five years, Health is going to deliver a motherload of business to the IT sector. In Europe, the health sector has become the focus of some of the biggest IT projects ever undertaken in the public sector.
In Australia, after many false starts, governments are trying to use IT to reduce the administrative burden in the health sector. They believe the cost savings will be measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Including the health and welfare smartcard, these health IT projects in the next several years in Australia will be some of the biggest and most complex ever undertaken in this country.
There is nothing like the Great White Chief coming to town to get you in front of the right people.
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