OPEN THOUGHT
DON SAMBANDARAKSA
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| Surapong: concedes failure of e-government. |
There seems to be a strange consensus in Thailand's IT industry. First, that the highlight of the past two decades was the Anand Panyarachun government's National IT Committee (NITC). The other that things went terribly wrong in 2002 with the establishment of the ICT Ministry.
On this latter point, the view seems to range from mere disappointment to downright anger. Even former ICT Minister Surapong Suebwonglee spoke of the failure of e-government under his watch, which is the last thing to be expected from someone who used to be at its helm.
There could be two reasons for this. Firstly, only people who like me agreed to be interviewed in the first place. Which means that there's an implicit selection process, a pre-screening of interviewees.
Of course, nobody declined to be interviewed outright - but after a few days I got tired of calling or emailing their secretaries. "Unavailable for comment", is always nicer than "declined to be interviewed".
The other reason could be that they are right: that Nectec/NITC did a good job and that MICT is messing things up pretty badly. I think history will look back at Nectec's success (as secretariat of the NITC) not so much because of any structural or managerial design, but because if you put a lot of intelligent IT geeks together and give them a task, they will find a way to do it well, if a bit ad-hoc and unstructured.
My own recollection of 1987 was a traumatic time, as I was on my second attempt at getting past Mathayom 1 in a Thai school. Learning how to read and write Thai was hard enough, let alone learning subjects through a foreign language that I hardly understood.
IT milestones from that time? None major. The tank-like build quality of the IBM PC keyboard (the original PC, not the later PC-XT) still is engrained in my mind, as is the knowledge that a 5-watt 144MHz walkie-talkie, transmitting at point blank range, would reset one of those machines.
I had started programming at the age of 5 on an Apple, so for me technology was a part of life. It was not until my university years that I started on the road down the path less trodden. Since an inordinate amount of my time was spent answering questions from friends about how to use Microsoft Excel or Word, I soon ended up replying "no idea, I use Lotus Ami Pro on OS/2." Which was the truth.
Other highlights of my university years include de-learning C and Pascal structured programming and re-learning spaghetti code by means of Cobol (almost as traumatic as learning Thai, but not quite); realising how much sense database normalisation actually made (even Boyce-Codd Normal Form); and the fact that many so-called IT problems are not really IT problems, but real-world fuzziness that rigid, formal systems cannot comprehend. Such as an asset management system where the real location of assets and the ones submitted to the accounts department differs.
And there was the fact that the very first question I had when defending my final year project (a garage management database application written, of course, on Borland Paradox - would I use dBase or Foxpro?) was not technical or even about the application. Rather, my professor asked, "Why is your report written like a fairytale?"
Hardly industry milestones, but personal milestones that helped shape the person I was to become.
I first got involved with the "Ministry of Truth" in October of 2002, when it was still being run out of the Office of the Civil Service Commission. I later met Dr Thaweesak in January in Chiang Rai and Dr Rom in February in one of the MinTrue meetings and still remember being impressed at how much sense these clearly intelligent people were making in a room full of alternative-universe bureaucrats, who seemed to measure the success of a meeting by the weight of the minutes that had just been wheeled in.
But was the ICT Ministry doing anything right? I find myself in the dubious position of agreeing with former Minister Surapong that a lot was accomplished by MICT in the first year despite not having much of an operational budget. Or was it because it lacked a budget?
With no money, the best Surapong could have done was bring people together and make a lot of noise about projects, in other words act as a catalyst. But indeed, the Budget PC and TAM are clear examples of the power of synergy. Whether they are successful examples is open to debate. With no money, it was easy to get help from the US Trade Development Agency, the World Bank and others. In later years, when budgets were set up, it became business as usual when the bureaucrats and red tape moved in and innovation moved out the door.
My own milestones in MinTrue (aside from meeting Drs Rom and Thaweesak) must be the drafting of a project to study and develop an ICT curriculum among colleges in North-East Thailand. Actually it started off as a project for the Greater Mekong Sub-region, but as the donor nations did not want to deal with communist Laos, it was scaled down to Thailand. The joy of co-writing a project proposal, defending it at the World Bank, getting a quarter of a million dollars (plus another quarter of a million of in-kind support) was only matched by the sorrow of seeing the project derailed after a certain Thai Prime Minister decided to tell the world that the UN was not his father, which immediately threw ministerial policy into disarray.
Today, as a journalist, I feel that there are three categories of intelligent people in our industry. One is the country manager, who as clever as he (or she, lest IBM feel left out) may be, do not dare stand up and make a noise that may contravene corporate policy. The other is the lobbyist / businessman (interchangeable words in Thai culture, to varying degrees), whose comments need to be taken with a grain of salt. Then there is Nectec.
Nectec, a group of eccentric, idealistic and for the most part uncorrupted thinkers and dreamers. We need them to help balance the industry in the same way that we need academics with tenure to stand up for what is right, in a time when right may not be popular. Ensuring political independence of this think-tank is by far at the top of my to-do list in terms of what needs to happen next.
Actually there is a forth category: the retired former director or president. Manoo (ex-Sipa) and Pravit (ex-IBM) were a joy to behold, and I would like to be at the front of the queue to interview a post-Oracle Natasak when the time comes.
It is an honour to be here at the Post Database at this important milestone in history, one in which much of the IT Press across the world has decided to focus instead on gadgets and consumer products, leaving business IT to the business sections. But if that were to happen here, who would keep the MICT honest and on their toes? Who would celebrate the success of public sector IT? Who would cover the industry of software development, as opposed to simply reporting the business outcomes? I believe we've found ourselves a nice niche that we feel cozy in.
I wonder how the 30th anniversary piece will look?
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