The big 4 consulting firms are killing this country
The hollowing out of this nation's technical capacity was a mistake.
The news that the ASX is folding and taking a massive loss on its blockchain-backed replacement for CHESS holdings comes as no surprise to anyone who has the basic ability to google 'what is a blockchain', or who isn't deliberately paid to believe in blockchain hype.
Sadly the nation's stock exchange even buying into this nonsense is a broader indicator of the rot at the core of Australian society when it comes to technology. I have no doubt that there were smart and effective technologists inside the ASX who were steamrolled by external consultants with shiny suits and shinier teeth who said the blockchain was the solution to the idea of "knowing who owns what". Keep in mind this was a service the ASX was already providing quite effectively without the need for a group of weirdos to run some software on their home PC to make sure the nation's ability to trade securities continued unimpeded.
Blockchain technology has a very effective use case; cryptocurrencies. It's great at providing an indication as to who owns what in a trustless environment (making sure someone can't say double spend a particular dollar, the use of that dollar is validated by a distributed network of equally participating peers, to put it both technically poorly but also succinctly). Trustless is the key here, the point at which the authority that records who owns what securities in a regulated market thought about investigating a trustless solution is the point at which consulting dollars become less a function of transitory value and more a function of how much cocaine they can buy.
Australia has a massive problem with consulting firms. The % of spend of AU Taxpayer dollars that have gone into the pockets of KPMG, EY, Accenture and whatever that last one is called has skyrocketed. Thankfully with its recent budget the new Government is investing in bringing capacity in house - something that is both a strategic and national security imperative.
The broader issue here is the Australian business landscape is one of pervasive laziness. Australia is the great land of the second mover, the moment a particular strategy is proven to be even considered by another business the forces of mimesis mean that every other middling Australian business is jumping at the chance to implement it. The Optus and Medibank hacks are both shining indications of Australian technical incompetence. Having the skillsets to manage and deal with data at scale is now as table stakes as being able to accept currency for the work you do - and yet this function, particularly in this country is monumentally underinvested in.
Enter again, Deloitte, KPMG, EY etc. An entire workforce predicated on arbitrage of labour from the global south, slick marketing that resonates with the perpetually stupid and fearful and the eroding of institutional knowledge. They'll come in, recommend a blockchain (or whatever bs buzzword is apparent) solution for you for a SHARE MARKET and then come back 4 years later and write a report for $20m that the initial strategy they recommended was not followed and should be ignored.
There's a path out of this, the Victorian Government's Level Crossing Removal Authority. The LXRP was formed in 2015 and given a profound task, replace a series of level crossings (dangerous and routinely quite deadly) with transport infrastructure that provided unimpeded thoroughfare to vehicular transport and pedestrians. Their solution was to go deep, build knowledge internally and be funded and staffed to a degree that that knowledge and those insights could be built up internally.
It'll come as no surprise to anyone that this was a success. Building a broader deep bench of knowledge internally and funding it meant that the Victorians are years ahead of their project to remove all of these level crossings. Admittedly the idea of building new rail infrastructure and routing cars and pedestrians around it might seem dissimilar to technology - they're fundamentally the same problem of building, owning and nurturing institutional knowledge.
Australia is not going to be able to produce enough technologists (or enough managers with enough sense to deal with technologists and projects in those areas), we're going to need a steady source of people either immigrating, or third party groups that can provide these services.
The federal government has already committed to building up staffing numbers, but should be looking at every cent paid away to a consulting firm as a waste of taxpayer resources. If you can't hire technologists or people who have the right skillset because you're outcompeted by the private sector, increase the pay rate - you're the sovereign, you literally print that currency. There's no reason Australia could not be a first rate nation in terms of technical proficiency but this current sclerotic pathetic situation we find ourselves in is not something that has happened to us - it was always a choice. We can build our way out of it.