DR ROM / FORMER SOFTWARE PARK DIRECTOR
DON SAMBANDARAKSA
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| Dr Rom: 'lost opportunities' |
The greatest milestone in Thailand's IT history over the past 20 years was the establishment of the ICT Ministry, but history will remember it as a disaster that may need to be dismantled, according to Dr Rom Hiranpruk, former director of Software Park Thailand.
Rom had accompanied Thaksin Shinawatra to India's silicon valley of Bangalore in November of 2001 and it was then that the Prime Minister was convinced of the concept of an ICT Ministry - or so he thought.
"When MICT was set up, possibly with a hidden agenda, it was run by people who simply did not know what they were doing. It led to total havoc. Since 2002, we have been talking about the knowledge-based economy, but MICT did not have any knowledge workers. The drivers did not know where they were headed," Rom said.
"Do I have a problem with those running the show? Yes. But it is because they are making us slip backwards.
"If this were a football team, the entire team would have been fired by now," he added.
He cited a study by Brown University that has showed Thailand slipping backwards in all its ICT indicators relative to our neighbours since the MICT was set up in 2002.
Rather than being the driving force of a new industry, it was a distraction that left Thailand standing still while the neighbours sped ahead.
"I know everyone at Vietnam's Software Park. They came to learn from us during the first couple years of Software Park Thailand and we helped them. Now, everyone is investing in Vietnam's IT sector," he said.
Going back through time, Rom reflected on the lost opportunity of the Thaksin Government. "The Chuan and Banharn governments did not understand the world of the 21st century we now live in. I am not sure if General Chavalit understood it, or whether he was simply copying Dr Mahatir in Malaysia, but at least we got some things done then.
One of the packages put forward to the Chavalit government was for an information superhighway, the establishment of GITS (Government IT Services) and the Software Park Thailand incubation centre. Yet somehow, the only project which survived intact was Software Park, but even that was kept small because of lack of funding.
Even today, Dr Rom feels that there is political interference keeping technocrats like himself away from the halls of power.
For instance, he was given a day's notice for his interview for the latest e-commerce committee and could not make the interview. Many other vocal industry experts also mysteriously failed to make the cut for a powerful committee that is mysteriously populated with bureaucratic "yes-men."
"You need a merit-based system. When you have more than half the people in an organisation there because of their political connections, even with a god in charge, it would not succeed," he said.
The reason the now dormant National IT Committee succeeded in the 90s, he claimed, was because it had Nectec as a capable secretariat, not because of any structural design.
Moving forward, Rom, who today is assistant-president of the National Science and Technology Development Agency, says that the interim government can make some major changes in a short period of time.
One change can be restructuring and merging the National Telecommunications Commission and the yet to be established National Broadcasting Commission, something that has been done in most countries around the world because of technological convergence.
The government should also look at the possibility of disbanding the MICT and look to fix the mistakes and committees that have been set up in the past few years, rather than blindly charge forward with new projects.
"The Chalerm Thai theatre was for years a historical landmark of Bangkok, yet after much debate, we decided to pull it down as behind it was a building of even greater historical importance, the Loha-Prasart," Rom said in analogy.
Rather than projects, he said the Surayud Government should focus on infrastructure, not just the IT infrastructure, but the laws, the education, people and regulations as well as providing protection for IPR and venture capital for the knowledge industry.
"It is not a matter for the Ministry of Science and Technology or the Ministry of ICT, it is a matter for the entire government," he suggested.
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