DIGITIZING MANAGEMENT
PING NA THALANG
I just got back from attending a class on international air law in Singapore and found new appreciation of how international laws shape commerce and politics. It also demonstrated the huge hurdles that many countries have yet to overcome before international air travel can enjoy identical safety standards everywhere.
International air transport is a world-wide phenomenon. It deals with a pot-pourri of cultures, political agenda, domestic laws, etc. IT is very similar in structure and impact. While air transport deals mainly with the transport of people and goods across borders, IT deals with the movement of information across borders.
Today's IT environment - especially the Internet - is no longer a personal space or domestic arena. It is a world wide phenomenon that moves at lightning speed. A personal web site, a blog, a local news site in English, can have impact on the other side of the world in the time you take to click the upload button.
We all live and work based on information. When information was in the form of conventional media, such as paper, analogue transmissions, etc., the creation and distribution of information was limited and somewhat controllable. But with the power of digitised information has levelled the playing field.
As for the international corporate environment, IT and the Web are the foundation of the virtual corporation that allows people to work from anywhere on the planet.
A bricks and mortar office can be in one city, but most of the actual processing can be done elsewhere, via servers located in different countries. With most documents now in digital format, the inputting, storage, processing and outputting of them can be done anywhere that is technically or financially beneficial for that company.
Imagine the world as a single community. Air transport is like the roads that link that community together, while IT is similar to the phone service, post office, local radio and TVstations.
A normal town cannot exist without rules, or we would have chaos. At the moment, we're living in a town where each house has its own rules, and pretty much standardised rules of the road that most people adhere to.
But in this global village, we don't have rules to govern the way we communicate with our neighbours.
We can call them up and use foul and threatening language. We can create a pornographic or violent TV programme and broadcast it. We can taunt our enemies with lies for the whole town to see. And the list goes on.
Should IT be governed by international regulations?
In the future, we may see a day where we have a world-wide body that regulates the use of IT, but I doubt that we will see that any time soon.
Unlike the air transport community, where we manage tangible assets like aircraft, airports and a relatively few trained professionals, the IT community deals in intangibles as diverse as the human mind can conceive, which are controlled by anyone who can use a cheap computer connected to the Internet.
There may be attempts to regulate the international IT environment, however, the sheer magnitude of data that has direct impact on various cultures around the world - not to mention the rapid growth of IT, that always seems to outpace the law - it is next to impossible to create rules that all nations will abide by, and there's no point of having regulations that cannot be effectively enforced.
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