Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Prime Ministerial advisor and former NineMSN chief executive Martin Hoffman has suddenly emerged as the go-to guy for Rudd Government technology planning, appointed to the board of Stephen Conroy’s National Broadband Network company and to Lindsay Tanner’s Government 2.0 taskforce in the space of a fortnight.
He is also the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet’s
representative on the elite NBN project control group within Government.
Mr Hoffman is new to the public service, joining Prime Minister and Cabinet in March as Executive Co-ordinator,
Strategic Policy & Implementation. It is not clear whether this
role was always focused on ICT industry development issues, or whether he joined
Government specifically to drive NBN policy implementation - or both.
Regardless, Mr Hoffman’s talents were tapped by Finance Minister
Lindsay Tanner and Special Minister of State (and Cabinet Secretary)
Joe Ludwig when they put together the freshly-announced Government 2.0
Taskforce.
Mr Hoffman is not the only public servant on the Taskforce. Others
include Anne Steward from the Australian Government Information
Management Office; Mia Garlick from the Department of Broadband and
Communications; Peter Harper from the Bureau of Statistics; Glenn
Archer from the Education Department; and Adrian Cunningham from
National Archives.
But his new-ness to the Government, his previous roles with a
multinational and as an ICT entrepreneur, as well as his formal
attachment to NBN Company and proximity to Cabinet make Martin Hoffman
an interesting public servant indeed.
Stephen Conroy’s office has remained coy about the Hoffman interim
appointment to the Board, not commenting on the decision (which came
weeks after four interim Board appointments were announced – one each
from the Departments of Broadband and Communications; Finance; and
Treasury; with the last from the Solicitor General’s office to act as
company secretary.)
Mr Hoffman was CEO of NineMSN from January 2003 to July 2006, driving
the company from a loss-making position to over $30 million before tax
profit in the 2006 financial year. He has also held senior management
roles at Fairfax Media.
Most recently he was chief executive and a director of the mobile social networking services company MOKO.mobi.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
How to Make Business Discovery Work for Your Business
Business Discovery takes its cues from consumer apps. Like Google, it encourages us- ers to hunt for and explore data without worrying about or even noticing the underly- ing technology. Their entire experience is working within an intuitive interface to get real-time, self-service results with only minimal training. ...more
Try an easy-to-use set of web-enabled
tools for business-class productivity services. Office 365 provides
anywhere-access to email, important documents, contacts, and calendars
on almost any device.
Latest Headlines from IT INDUSTRY
