About 10 years ago, I remember attending an announcement launching what was to be a bold new initiative - the formation of a new peak IT industry lobby group.

The new group, the Indigenous Information Industries Association, was supposedly going to represent the interests of home grown Australian IT companies. Unlike the Australian Information Industries Association (AIIA), which was and still is largely seen to be representing the interests of IT multinationals, this new group was going to represent the little guys, those brave new battling innovative Aussie technology SMEs.

Needless to say, the new organisation proved to be a total flop while the AIIA continues to this day doing what it does best. One of the reasons the fledgling lobby group failed was that it completely missed the point. The overseas multinationals are not necessarily the bad guys. Some of them are actually quite good. Look what companies like Intel and EMC have done for countries such as Ireland and Israel. Companies like Siemens and NEC still actually do some good development work here in Australia. There is a UK software company called Anite that is doing a pretty good .Net development project right now for the Victorian Government using local developers.

The point is that it does not matter one hoot where the head office of a particular company is. What matters is how much intellectual capital that company produces in Australia. The companies that are important to the well being of the Australian ICT industry are the ICT producers. These are the companies that create high level technology jobs and teach our brightest people to become innovators and in turn create their own companies.

To provide an example, HP used to do some good work in Australia. It had an innovative software development group called the ASO (Australian Software Organisation) which it abandoned and in the process spawned a successful innovative Australian company called OSA, later to be renamed ManageSoft. HP also abandoned its Melbourne based calculator division, which happened to be doing some fantastic work in the area of Linux based PDAs. As a result, an innovative new Australian company called Hydrix was born, led by former HP engineers, which specialises in the development of prototypes for new PDA devices.

What Australia needs is an organisation that represents the interests of Australian technology producers. Its membership should be restricted only to companies that develop and produce technology in Australia, regardless of whether they are multinationals or local SMEs. It is quite obvious that whatever government is in power, the interests of technology producers are not being represented by the AIIA - take a quick glance at its membership. Thus, as successive governments roll on our ICT deficit keeps snowballing and the best that good local technology companies can hope for is that they will get bought out by an overseas multinational. What happens then is that the founders get rich and retire, while the technology moves offshore and is lost to Australia forever.

It does not matter whether the organisation calls itself the ICT Producers Association of Australia, ICT Producers Australia, Australian Technology Association or something else. What is clear that an organisation should be formed that represents the interests of every single Australian innovator and membership should be so attractive that it would be crazy for any company interested in its future prosperity not to be a member.

Australia's best hope to produce some serious global technology players is through the collaborative efforts of its multitude of innovative small technology companies. Our nation needs an organisation that can help bring these excellent little companies together and that has some clout in Canberra. Otherwise, we might as well resign ourselves to a future of being a nation of technology sales offices.