Former Sipa president says freedom of information is paramount to build a knowledge-based society

DON SAMBANDARAKSA

A boy tries out an interactive car racing game at the Microsoft Thailand booth during Thailand and Animation and Multimedia 2004 at the Queen Sirikit National Convention Centre. — KARNJANA KARNJANATAWE

'The past 20 years has seen Thailand set many milestones, but we have failed to achieve them."

That was the damning assessment of Manoo Oradeedolchest, former president of the ICT Ministry's Software Industry Promotion Agency (Sipa), when asked to reflect on the milestones that Thailand has passed since the first issue of the Post Database landed on the newsstands 20 years ago.

Manoo dismissed the first decade as one with a small and weak private sector incapable of investment, but it was only later when the Anand Panyarachun government set up the National IT Committee (NITC), through the work of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Environment and its National Electronics and Computer Technology Centre (Nectec), that the ball started to roll.

"The NITC was the biggest achievement of all. Without formal direction, it is hard for development and harder to entice investment from overseas," he said.

In 1995 Manoo was part of the team that worked on developing IT2000, the first national IT master plan. That period was a time of great pressure on Thailand to liberalise the telecom markets and the main focus of the Ministry of Transport and Communications was around that.

Education in the new era was always to be paramount. Manoo explained that Nectec saw this and initiated the school Internet project, Schoolnet. Only much later was it transferred out of the Ministry of Education, where nothing happened to it and it was left to stagnate.

Manoo's later commitment to government stemmed from his experience in the finance and banking sector.

Manoo: `think at grassroots level'

"There was a time when Thailand started off well. We wrote a lot of software to support the financial sector - the SET and the banks - but after a point it fell apart. What happened was the Internet. Thailand failed to invest in the R&D necessary to successfully make the transition from the era of analogue communications to digital. Our industry became obsolete overnight. That was the single biggest missed opportunity of the past two decades," he suggested.

The advent of the Internet led Manoo to believe that Thailand needed a strong government IT core to help guide the private sector through such inflection points in technology, rather than having to spend time catching up after each paradigm change.

Manoo also worked on IT2010, pushing hard for the establishment of a software industry promotion body to fill that need.

Thaksin Shinawatra bought into the idea and Sipa was made to happen under ICT Minister Surapong Suebwonglee. But Manoo felt that this was yet another false dawn.

"The Ministry of Science tried to work and help set up things, but somehow it did not work. You see, with each change of government, each change of minister or each time responsibilities are handed over from one agency to another, we had to start again."

Thailand's lack of a concrete national agenda, unlike Vietnam, meant that Microsoft, IBM and Intel are all investing heavily there.

"I went with [former Finance Minister] Dr Somkit to New York to try and bring in investment, but nothing has happened since he left office," Manoo explained.

Manoo feels that Thailand had a case of "too many cooks spoiling the broth." The IT agenda was split between the Ministries of Education (for human resources), Interior (with the majority of data), Commerce (with transactions), Science and Technology (with the know-how) and ICT (with the mandate).

Manoo said that today, Thailand remains strong in banking, but rather than in systems with our own home grown technology, we have become nothing more than a subject matter expert relying on foreign technology.

Today, despite our aspirations to become a regional ICT hub, Manoo feels that it cannot happen without a large enough anchor company the way India has Tata, Infosys and Wipro. Without these large companies, Thailand cannot compete for large software projects on the international stage.

One of Manoo's lasting legacies as the president of Sipa is bound to be his promotion of the animation and multimedia industry.

Animation and digital content is a merger of two worlds, of art and technology. A lot of programming is needed in games. But is it software? Many countries have merged their IT Ministries with those of Arts and Culture, such as Singapore.

"It is a grey area, but we shouldn't be arguing about where animation should be. More importantly, it succeeded in generating awareness and visibility," he said.

He questioned his successors as to why the focus had shifted. "Thailand had one big 100 million baht animation project, but unless we keep up the momentum and do another, we will not generate the skills needed for us to succeed in the global market."

Manoo said that Thailand Animation and Multimedia 2007 - traditionally held on Children's Day in January but this year postponed towards the end of the year - was a victim of the political uncertainty. The Sipa board was changing and nobody knew if the new board would commit to TAM or even who they would be.

So what were Manoo's proudest achievements in Sipa during his three-year tenure as president?

He has been involved with public policy for over 20 years and he said that heading Sipa was a dream come true. Indeed, he came to Sipa just as the consumer Internet was sweeping across Thailand.

Top of his list was the introduction of a formal methodology to improve software quality such as CMMI.

Another key success was in foreign relations and cooperation of the private sector. During those three years, Thailand took a much more active role in the Asian-Oceanian IT Computing Organisation and gained the acceptance of the organisation's members.

Third, he was able to get the Thaksin government to agree to fund work towards building up that Thai IT anchor company that we so sorely need. However, on this last point, while everything was agreed to in principle before he left Sipa, work on it stopped after the September 19 coup.

"We went to Thaksin and told him of the need to create larger, winning IT organisations. Thaksin agreed to give Sipa 100 million baht of lottery money. This was during the time of Minister Sora-At Klinpratoom. Everything stopped of course, but I hope the new Sipa board continues the idea somehow," he said.

Indeed, Manoo named a whole catalogue of unfinished projects that he hoped would be continued under the new Sipa president: e-government citizen services through SOA (services oriented architecture); promotion of ICT use in tourism, again through web services and SOA; promoting new Web 2.0 technologies such as the tourism and Google Earth mash-up that was completed; and work on developing an IT curriculum and workforce skills.

One of Manoo's basic building blocks for the knowledge-based society is to ensure that freedom of information is paramount. This means access to telecommunication networks, even in rural areas. "This does not have to be fancy and expensive. But it is about reaching the grassroots in an affordable way."

Manoo said he spoke at the International Telecommunications Union in Geneva about Canadian John Hawker's "Room for Life" project in Sakon Nakhon. For only a few hundred thousand baht, an entire village could receive satellite IP-broadcast content, cache it and share it in a bandwidth-conscious and scalable way.

"If only the project thinkers would really think at the grassroots level. Today the government is doing a logistics master plan, but what we really need is a logistics framework that will help connect small shops together and help them compete with the superstores. We need models that focus on the long tail economy," he pointed out.

Today Manoo is chairman of ICT Policy at Sripatum University. He took the job to focus on a new way of applying IT after his years in Sipa.

"Traditionally, everyone uses IT for mission-critical apps, for ERP and for vertical industries, but we never really addressed the use of IT for general services," he explained. "A typical government hospital like Chulalongkorn is full of technology, yet patients still have to queue up from the crack of dawn and wait in queues."

Manoo believes, along with IBM, that the next frontier in IT is service science, applying IT not for the business operations, but to provide a true customer-centric (or patient- or in his case, student-centric) service.