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Technology

legislator pushes for a bigger role for it

By Robin Hicks | 24 August 2009

Unlike most of us, Dr Tam Wai-Ho Samson does not need to work.

Barely in his forties, the entrepreneurial Hong Konger was a US-dollar millionaire as a twentysomething thanks to an invention called the Instant-Dict, an electronic Chinese-English dictionary that has become as ubiquitous as dim sum in the two decades it has been on shelves.

But Dr Tam has “a bee in his bonnet” to fulfill new ambitions. In September 2008 he entered the latest phase of his working life as an elected member of the Legislative Council of Hong Kong for what the territory uniquely (others would say bizarrely) calls a ‘functional constituency’. Not a district, town or village, but an industry.

In Dr Tam’s case, his constituency is information technology.

In a nutshell, his job is to drive societal change using IT. This involves, among many other things, pushing through legislation to help Hong Kong’s IT industry develop and ensure that technology is meaningfully used as Hong Kong embraces a knowledge-based economy.

Though a businessman at heart, Dr Tam is no stranger to public service. He has a long list of committee and board memberships and chairmanships, and a groaning trophy cabinet of awards (he won the Young Industrialist Award of Hong Kong in 1992 and was made an Honorary Fellow of Hong Kong University of Science & Technology 16 years later.)

But less than a year into a four-year term in the role, Dr Tam is still adapting to the “culture shock” of his new surroundings at LegCo, Hong Kong’s Legislative Council.

“The mindset in the business world is very different, and it is taking time for me to adapt,” he says. “The problem with many public servants is that they lack business sense. Without it, it is difficult to understand what is going on in the real world.”

The way meetings are organised has been a frustration, he says. “In the business sector efficiency is critical. So meetings proceed at speed. But government doesn’t seem to care about time. The process can be painfully slow. Officials take things step by step. Debate is never straightforward.”

But over the last few months Dr Tam has begun to understand how things work and build the relationships he needs to get things done. High on his agenda is to bridge the digital divide in Hong Kong, a territory that one not might think has much of a divide to bridge.

“Accessing services is not a problem for most young people or big corporations. But there’s still a long way to go for small to medium-sized enterprises, which make up the majority of businesses in Hong Kong.”

SMEs are still using the old way of doing business, which is not doing Hong Kong’s bid to become a hub for trade with China any good, he says. “Our companies have to become e-businesses if they are to build strong relationships on the mainland.”

This wouldn’t require a huge amount investment, reckons Dr Tam. Hong Kong is a relatively small place, and transforming it into an completely Wi-Fi-ed city would be relatively straightforward.

“Problem is, we are strong in finance, education and manufacturing, but not IT. The local industry is not as involved as it might be in moving things forward, and there is a perception that government IT projects are not sexy or lucrative enough to justify the effort or resources.”

For this he places the blame, unsurprisingly perhaps (he is a legislator after all), on government. In particular, the Office of the Government Chief Information Officer (OGCIO), with which Dr Tam shares a podium at the Government Information Forum at the Grand Hyatt this month.

“The structure of OGCIO is not suitable to drive government IT initiatives on a large scale. OGCIO should not just be a CIO agency. It should be a genuine agent for change. But it cannot be without a leader of higher rank or status as a standalone bureau,” he says.

A matrix reporting structure where agency IT directors report into OGCIO has restricted the clout of government IT, he says. “It’s a good system in the sense that managers have a certain amount of autonomy. But it’s not good at driving IT projects in a joined up, holistic way.”

Though he thinks the unit has been performing far from perfectly, he has praise for how OGCIO has supported new technology adoption in healthcare and immigration. However, he adds that a central office should do more to ensure that not only a few departments are “good at IT”.

“Internet penetration in Hong Kong is very high, so every department should be making better use of IT to deliver better services to citizens,” he says. “In the past, the government has been good at using IT to improve efficiency. Now it should look more closely at improving service delivery and customer satisfaction.”

Dr Tam says Hong Kong’s government should be doing more to connect itself with its neighbours too. He is heavily involved in the Pearl Delta regional integration project that is linking Hong Kong with Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Shanghai.

“We have been spending lots of money on building bridges with China, but only in the physical sense. Government needs to understand how to use IT to shorten the distance between these cities,” he says.

Cultural and structural differences between the Hong Kong and Chinese governments will not make the integration of services and communications easy, he says. So a more concerted effort to combine the efforts of government, the private sector and NGOs is needed.

But this is not Dr Tam’s main priority. Top of his to-do list for this year and beyond is to push government to set policy to strengthen Hong Kong’s creative industry with IT at the centre. This will require his trump card: networking ability.

“At its core, my role is about connecting different people and skill sets, from different cities and countries so that, ultimately, we become a better connected country,” he says.

“But in the long run my hope is to support the government in creating an e-community so that the public voice can be properly heard by government.”

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