Collaborating for the future – The new Asian opportunity
At the World Conference on Information Technology (WCIT 2008) held in Kuala Lumpur, an interesting inter ministerial panel discussion featuring the Information and Communications Technology ministers of Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines and Mexico demonstrated how much impact Government IT policy can have on the destinies of nations in the IT industry. Singapore through its investments in supply chain reengineering and broadband penetration that now enables a majority of businesses and eighty percent of households to have access to high speed internet connectivity has shown the way by string government action in usage and proliferation, making it easy for entrepreneurial firms to emerge to service the national need. Malaysia, whose spurt in ICT commenced over a decade ago with the concept of the Multimedia Super corridor which spawned the creation of one of the fastest growing IT regions in the form of Cyberjaya is now investing in skills development of its workforce and aggressive investment promotion incentives to attract the world’s best names like Microsoft and HSBC to accelerate their expansion in this country. Philippines continues to exude its quiet confidence that the availability of high quality accounting talent will enable it to move BPO business away from India while Mexico sees its proximity to the US as its biggest advantage in its own ventures in outsourcing.
And what of India which can legitimately claim to have invented concepts like IT enabled services and Offshore Outsourcing and opened up a vista of new opportunity to young people in all emerging countries? Communications IT Minister Raja in a well articulated session at the conference enlightened the audience about the Government’s initiatives in connecting all academic institutions to foster joint research and admitted that the proliferation of broadband in the country was still weak in comparison to some of the erstwhile Asian tigers like Singapore and Malaysia . In our subsequent panel on Asia’s future in Outsourcing, the consensus that emerged was that collaboration is the key for ongoing success for which some commonality of initiatives – in education, technology deployment and best practices sharing would only add to the success of the Asian community and all its country constituents.
The good news is that technologies that enable collaboration and innovation are being invented at a faster pace than ever which is good news for all participating firms and countries. Craig Barrett in person and Bill Gates through a holographic projection offered enough new technology ideas at the WCIT conference to over three thousand delegates from ninety countries. Intel’s Classroom PC which is already changing the outlook of millions of young learners in all parts of the world and Microsoft’s new Surface technology which will make put image and artefact manipulation and transfer literally at our fingertips in the near future open up vistas of opportunities to enable the digital revolution to embrace all citizens of the planet and it will need progressive partnerships between government, academia and ICT entrepreneurs to create new applications for businesses and communities in the years to come