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E-Government

Discussions from FutureGov Forum Hong Kong

9 April 2010

FutureGov caught up with Peter Man, General Manager, Novell Hong Kong, on the sidelines of the recent FutureGov Forum Hong Kong, to discuss some of the challenges faced by governments in response to new technologies and demands placed upon them by their citizens.

FutureGov: The main themes brought out by Hong Kong’s Government CIO, Jeremy Godfrey at the Forum were: Joined-up government, driving greater efficiencies, exploiting opportunities of cloud and social computing, and using IT to tackle climate change. Can you comment on what challenges you see ahead for Hong Kong’s public sector in achieving these aims.

Peter Man: The challenges the IT industry are facing, I will say is not limited to the public sector. The critical factor we are facing now is the fundamental changes in the business models. We are not only talking about new technologies, but also new ways of doing things, new services we need to provide to our customers, and new roles of IT in the new business paradigm.

Let’s use social computing as an example. Social computing started in the late 70’s with Usenet, then came ICQ, Microsoft Messenger, Yahoo Chat, etc. In the past few years, Facebook, Twitter, etc. have become the primary media for social interaction. These tools are mainly for personal use but we see businesses starting to use these media for advertising and business information sharing and updates as well.

Are enterprises and governments ready for social computing? The technologies are there: for example, Novell announced the new generation social tool for business use: Novell Pulse. We demoed the tool in our BrainShare event at Salt Lake City, Utah, last week and it will be available to the general market in a couple of months. This tool allows real time co-authoring, communication and social messaging in a secure way in the enterprise, not only within the company boundary, but for the first time, also allow secure inter-company collaboration with people in another company, for example, using Google Wave.

We believe it is the future where we are heading as the technologies finally allow us to deliver our daily work in a more effective manner – in a group to share ideas and to create work together in real time. The challenge we see here is whether CIOs will take the initiative to implement this new working model, and how they can educate users to use these new platforms as the primary media for their daily work.

The panel discussion on the Pearl River Delta looked at the challenges for government agencies across borders sharing information and technology. Novell’s vision is to help people and technology to work as one. What challenges do you encounter when helping the public sector to make better use of technology?

Cross border sharing of information and services has long been a vision in the government sector under the “one country, two systems” model. Within the public sector, there is much concern about the protection of sensitive and confidential information, such as users’ authentication credentials, to prevent unauthorised access to sensitive information for illegal activities.

Novell, as the leader in the identity and security management market, has been providing access management solutions to governments around the world for many years. This allows secure access to information and services within the organisations boundary and also across different jurisdictions via federated identities management such as SAML.

Since 2005 over 90% of the departments within the Government of the HKSAR have been using Novell Access Manager for cross department authentication services via SAML. This allows civil servants to access services provided by central government agencies securely and effectively. Novell has many years of experience in the identity and security space and there are many in-house consultants and system integrators who are familiar with not only Novell’s technologies and solutions, but also the industry standards of federated identities. Macau Government also uses Novell solutions for their federated identities needs, and the authentication framework behind www.gov.mo for the Macau citizens are also powered by Novell technologies.

The technologies are ready today to allow organisations to provide and to access services and information across boundaries, whether it is the department in the next building or another government across the border or in another province. This is a practical example of Novell’s vision “Making IT Work As One” at work. As long as policies allow, the integration of IT services within the Pearl River Delta will not be a challenge. We see the importance of having the infrastructure ready that will allow Hong Kong to integrate into a bigger market to avoid being isolated in the coming future.

During the Forum’s discussion about cloud computing, concerns were raised by speakers and from the delegates about the risk of technology lock in and data control staying with vendors. What solutions does Novell offer that would help to address these concerns?

Novell understands from our customers that the new trends of Cloud Computing pose much concern on vendors lock-in, security and the requirements for compliance. We believe all customers including government will have a highly heterogeneous environment composed of physical/virtual workloads, traditional and private/public cloud computing models. To address our customers’ concerns, Novell is focusing on Intelligent Workload Management (IWM) to tie all these together in a secure and efficient way to allow governments to provide services to citizens in the most effective manner.

Why should IT and Governments care about intelligent workload management? Our industry is characterised by rapid change and innovation, but at the same time people have increased concerns with being locked into a particular technology or vendor. We are in the early stages of yet another technology life cycle — this one characterised not so much by technical features or functional innovation but by innovation of the computing business model and platform. This life cycle holds great promise in helping IT leaders reduce the cost of their operations while increasing flexibility and agility. This is done by disaggregating their IT workloads from the physical infrastructures required to run them—namely through the use of virtualisation and emerging software, platform and infrastructure cloud computing models.

Virtualisation has been around for a while and every other IT article mentions the cloud. But isn’t everybody already there? While virtualisation has indeed gone mainstream, recent industry studies suggest that only 16% of computing workloads are virtualised. And while the conversation around cloud computing is hot; the uptake is not there yet. Only about 1% of all computing workloads are hosted today.

With so much promise around reduced cost and increased flexibility, what’s preventing CIO’s from moving more of their IT workloads to virtualised and cloud environments? In a recent IDC poll of CXOs at major companies they identified three core issues and concerns mitigating their widespread adoption of these promising platforms and business models: Security, Performance / Management and Availability. Our customers want the flexibility to be able to move workloads freely across physical, virtual and cloud environments so they can maximise efficiencies and make the most of their existing IT resources. To do this, they tell us that workloads need to be secure, easily managed, and able to support their various government policies and compliance requirements. In short, the workload needs to be intelligent.

As this new world of IT comes into focus, we believe there are a few simple areas that will need to be addressed to reach the full potential of the current technology lifecycle—namely: 1) The risk and challenges of computing across multiple environments must be eliminated; 2) Users should have unimpeded, secure and compliant access to the full computing services they need to do their jobs; and 3) Computing should be secure, compliant and portable.

To be sure, these areas are both bold and aspirational and effectively addressing them will require broad IT ecosystem participation and cooperation. That’s why intelligent workload management is what Novell is focusing on and we intend to lead the market with our technologies.

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