Fifteen hundred and forty-nine days. And counting. Four years and all but three months since a curious audience of Scotland's arts communities gathered in Glasgow to hear then First Minister Jack McConnell talk about the nation's culture on St Andrew's Day.

He was well received, not least because he talked about the importance of creative activity in revitalising every area of national life, and of that imperative cross-cutting every department of the executive.

Then the Cultural Commission was born. Everyone and their auntie and their auntie's second cousin once removed was urged to make submissions about what they did and why they did it. Reports, annual and other, were scoured for evidence and analysis.

In June 2005, after the judicious felling of several small forests, its final report emerged. It was just under nine centimetres thick and ran to some 300 pages - followed by 12 annexes of roughly the same duration. It duly sank under the weight of its conclusions. But out of it was born the promise of a culture bill that would variously deal with "entitlements", and a new agency to be called Creative Scotland. A culture bill, albeit in anorexic form, has survived the change of government and will be formally laid before Holyrood on March 12. Creative Scotland will come into being next year. In short, reader dear, it has been a long and winding road to reach a point where Scotland may find a new coherence and energy in how it nourishes and markets its creativity.

And this week, as the outgoing Scottish Arts Council holds a major three-day conference with some 400 contributors, there is a palpable sense that the talking and the consulting (and the bickering) soon has to stop. We've had charters for the arts, national cultural strategies and sons and daughters of both. See us? See reports? Plus, we're on our seventh arts minister in nine years, and with each new incumbent comes a new tweak of the portfolio. This is a turnover that makes Italian politics seem a model of continuity.

Now it's down to current minister Linda Fabiani to disinter the vision from the paper mountain. Anne Bonnar, appointed to manage the change - from the demise of the Scottish Arts Council and Scottish Screen to the birth of Creative Scotland - has camped in Dundee, safely out of lobbying distance from either agency. She is well aware that the sector will not bear another bout of scrutiny in the foreseeable future, or another invitation to contemplate its creative navel.

Yet she is a godmother who will need to keep the cultural mafia on side, even though the arrival of Creative Scotland means the departure of two existing bodies and, for many other organisations, something of a lobotomy on their traditional mindset. Just as howls of well-orchestrated anguish greeted the announcement in England that many existing bodies would henceforth be a grant-free zone as new ventures were encouraged, the onward march of Creative Scotland will cause a panicky flurry in many Scottish doo'cots. There will be difficulties with language. The working assumption is that the arts will become an integrated part of a broad cultural canvas collectively operating as the creative industries.

As this week's conference debate on the crossover between culture and tourism proved, many cultural purveyors are deeply suspicious of overtly commercial terminology or any box-ticking mentality. It's probably a hangover from Thatcherian times when arts organisations had to parrot dutiful phrases about economic impact into funding submissions. Yet there is a logic to maximising interconnectivity in a country of our size while still cherishing diversity.

On the other side of the picture, the enterprise community will also want to retain their separate role and kitties. Given all of the above, the new agency will need to recruit a dynamic and persuasive chief executive with no recent previous convictions in the Scottish cultural sector. The vibrancy of the creative scene and the buzziness of the political one will hopefully prove seductive to a high-calibre candidate.

Creative Scotland cannot be housed in either the vacated SAC or Scottish Screen offices. It would send out every wrong signal about a brave new dawn. It will need a board with energy, wide-ranging skills and global contacts at a senior level.

And, in a world moving at an extraordinary pace, it will need a research arm capable of thinking tomorrow's thoughts and a management team sufficiently fleet of foot to implement them.

No major players in the international creative industries have to wade through bureaucratic treacle or negotiate departmental layers whose indecision is final. Can Creative Scotland pull that off? If it doesn't, there will be long, weary years before any appetite is whetted for yet another rethink.