The Need for a High Level Committee to Assist the Information Infrastructure Coordinating Office in Guiding Hong Kong's Transition into the Information Age
Background
The Hong Kong Computer Society (HKCS) is a professional organization established in Hong Kong since 1970. Our objective is to promote innovative and responsible applications of information technologies in Hong Kong through the continuous improvement of the professional standard and quality of our membership. The Society also has programs designed to increase the public understanding and awareness of the information technologies and their vital roles in shaping and developing the future of our community.
To ensure our success into the next millennium, it is widely accepted that Hong Kong must accelerate its pace in transforming itself from a labour intensive manufacturing based economy into a services led, information and knowledge intensive one. It must continue to support virtual enterprises with physical manufacturing capabilities located outside of the Hong Kong region. To facilitate this economic transformation, the need for a set of sound information policies together with the development of a Regional Information Infrastructure (RII) have been identified and extensively discussed within the HKCS.
In his Policy Speech delivered on October 8th 1997, Our Chief Executive, Mr. Tung Chee Hwa has clearly pointed out the importance of information technologies on our community and has committed to re-align and re-group the functions of various government departments so that one Bureau Secretary will be given the responsibility to lead and co-ordinate the work throughout the Government organization involved in information technologies and the related areas of broadcasting and telecommunications.
The Basis of our Argument
Major economic entities throughout of the world have attached a high degree importance to the development of a Global Information Infrastructure (GII) and their respective National Information Infrastructures (NII). In February 1995, at a meeting held in Brussels, leaders from the major economic powers confirmed their support of a GII as an important initiative in creating a more favorable international environment for commerce; they were convinced that a GII would be conducive towards the sharing of information and knowledge for the betterment of mutual understanding and international relationship.
The term Information Super Highway is frequently used interchangeably with "Global Information Infrastructure" and "National Information Infrastructure".
Whilst Internet is generally accepted as the most viable technological vehicle in establishing a foundation for these infrastructure constructions, the loose usage of terminology — GII, NII, Information Super Highway and the Internet—has caused a great deal of confusion amongst the public and policy makers. Many have mistaken the construction of the GII and NII as the development of Internet networks on a global or national level. This misunderstanding not only undermines the importance of the GII and NII initiatives, it also gives us false expectations and wrongly over simplifying the tasks we are facing.
The Information Infrastructure that we will need to develop is an integration of the hardware, software, people skills, disciplines, laws, other social and cultural elements that will make the infrastructure usable and affordable to people and organizations wishing to connect with each other; it will also give them access to a vast array of services and information resources for the improvement of their quality of life.
An Advisory Council on the National Information Infrastructure was established in September 1993 in the United States. This Council advises the Federal Government on its national strategy for promoting the development of a National Information Infrastructure.
Singapore has created a national IT2000 program with the vision to transform Singapore into an intelligent island. Under this plan, Singapore is aiming at becoming one of the first countries in the world with an advanced nationwide information infrastructure. It will connect computers in virtually every homes, offices, schools, and factory. It will provide a wide range of communication means and access to services. As part of this master plan, a national high-capacity network infrastructure known as Singapore ONE will be built. It comprises two distinct but interrelated levels - an infrastructure level of networks and switches, and a level of applications and multimedia services. An National IT Committee was formed consisting of ministry level officials, university presidents and experts from the private sectors. This Committee is responsible for guiding the implementation of this national plan.
Mainland China has established a ministerial level committee (Steering Committee of National Information Infrastructure ÐÅÏ¢»¯¹¤×÷Á쵼С×é ) under the State Council (¹úÎñÔº) to plan and to coordinate the construction of the China NII and RII's in various cities and provinces. A series of projects known as the Gold Projects (Gold Bridge, Gold Customs, Gold Tax....) has already been set up as a part of China's NII construction initiative.
For Hong Kong as an SAR of China, the planning and construction of its RII should dovetail not only with the China NII projects but also with their GII initiatives. Hong Kong has the responsibility to offer ourselves as a major contributory member in the planning and construction of the China NII.
The Scope of the Hong Kong RII Construction
To adequately address the scope of a Regional Information Infrastructure in Hong Kong, the following issues should be individually and collectively reviewed:
Implications on Education and Manpower Policies
Our manpower policy must play a proactive role in ensuring that we have a competent and competitive workforce to cope with a continued economic transformation. A population who not only enjoys but also contributes to an information-intensive economy is necessary to ensure Hong Kong's continued success. One of the characteristics of the Information Age is the explosion of information. Much of this information, however, has a relatively short useful life span. We must not permit our education process to be reduce into the teaching of the trivia and the accumulation of disposable skills. We should start reviewing our education programs and school curricula in order to avoid spending our limited resources in producing a workforce having a gross mismatch with the demands of our time.
In the information age, we need a workforce capable of life-long learning, an intelligent workforce in possession of renewable, self-refreshing skills. Against such objectives, the existing education system is producing very poor results indeed. We may have to be prepared to go back to the basics and review the fundamentals.
It is plainly clear that the Hong Kong RII will have a very positive impact on our life-long learning needs in this Information Age. The RII will provide the delivery vehicle for information and knowledge contents. As part of the RII policy, we need to seriously encourage the development of contents which reflect Hong Kong's economic needs as well as the social and cultural values of our community. Failure to address the content development aspect of the RII construction is analogous to embarking on the construction of a complex road system without putting cars and people into the design of the road network. The so called Information Super Highway (or the Internet) will only provide the roads for information transportation. On the broader scope of the RII construction, the development of meaningful, relevant and needed information resources must be appropriately addressed to take full advantage of the physical network. Educational content development is one of the highest priority content categories that we need to consider. The development of the education contents can become an important services industry and is potentially one of the replacements of the manufacturing industry that has migrated out of Hong Kong.
The Chief Executive's Policy Speech has unambiguously declared the direction of the SAR Government to invest in the integration of IT into our primary and secondary school systems. The Hong Kong Computer Society has drafted a separated Paper "Information Technologies and Education Quality Improvement – Our Investment into the future" to provide our feed-back on this issue.
Implications on the Regulatory & Legal Framework
Business transactions involving information access, information submission and services delivery are to be carried out on the GII, NII and RII networks. The need for the development of relevant regulations, enacting new legislation and amending old ones is crucial. We need a regulatory and legal framework capable of protecting us against the new breed of crimes which can be committed electronically over networks. The existing laws and ordinances in Hong Kong are inadequate in dealing with the complex nature of electronic crimes which can be committed across geographic boundaries and legal jurisdictions. Hong Kong is not alone in facing the new challenges of the Information Age. We must work proactively with China and the international community to have comprehensive and on-going reviews of our civil and criminal laws to ensure that they are not outdated and ineffective in dealing with the adoption of new technologies in the construction of our RII.
The changes in the regulatory and legal framework must be designed to address, among others, the issues related to privacy, personal data confidentiality, authentication, data security, cryptography, intellectual property ownership, copyright protection, distribution of obscene and illegal contents over networks, property and monetary crimes committed using the networks.
Implications on Industries
The construction of our RII is a necessary step in Hong Kong's successful transformation into a world-class services-led economy. It is also a corner stone allowing us to implement the vision of virtual enterprises and agile manufacturing capabilities capsulated under the "Made by Hong Kong" initiative. RII will greatly benefit the delivery of information resources in many of our highly successful business sectors, including the banking, financial, trading, telecommunication and transportation industries. It will dramatically increase our competitiveness in providing quality products and services with significant improvement to our business operational efficiency.
At the same time, the construction and continuous improvement of our RII, the integration of this RII with the Mainland NII can become a fertile ground for the development and growth of our local information technology industry. Hong Kong is in search for a replacement of its manufacturing industries which have moved out of Hong Kong. It leads therefore to the argument that we are in urgent need to identify new industrial opportunities with high value-added properties which are non-polluting to our increasingly urban environment. Such new industries should ideally be land efficient as well. Ideally such industries are still relatively young and are therefore growing at a significant rate.
Information Technology, particularly the development of software, information services and contents development, would in our view fit in well the above-referenced criterion. But how does Hong Kong business break into the international IT market place and handle the risks associated with a fledgling industry? We believe the development of the Hong Kong RII provides an ideal opportunity for the government to assert some amount of leadership to allow the local firms and private sectors to move forward in fostering a new industry that we badly need.
Implications on Public Sector Services and Government
As part of their NII constructions, some countries have placed priority in using the NII capabilities to make government information and services more accessible to the public. The United States Government Information Locator System (GILS) project is one of those initiatives. The use of the NII for information delivery to the public will greatly reduce the costs associated with the dissemination of government information to needed parties. It will also help in creating a more efficient, open, transparent and accountable civil services system and government structure.
The Hong Kong government has initiated actions in this area. However, success is still fragmentary and limited. With the large amount of public records and government information that we have accumulated and continue to generate, a good deal remains to be done. With limited resources, priority can be given to information which is crucial to our business sector and data of value and interest to the general public. Some examples include government forms, laws and ordinances, policy papers, government gazette, public records maintained by the Land Registry and Company Registry.
We have intentionally omitted the technology aspect from the above discussion on the scope of the RII construction. We are satisfied that the technology aspects of the RII, and in particular the Internet, are adequately discussed elsewhere. We have therefore focused on the four aspects of the RII construction which we feel are equally important, if not more so than the technology itself. To recapitulate, they are:
The Need for Establishing a High Level Committee to Guide Hong Kong's Transition into the Information Age
We have argued that the development of the Hong Kong RII is a crucial step to transition Hong Kong into a services-led, information and knowledge intensive economy. We have also pointed out the development of the RII is not merely an investment into a physical and technological infrastructure. A comprehensive and content rich RII has the most far-reaching effects on many aspects of our life and the economic and social well-being of our community. It also has very direct consequences to our contributory role on the social-political modernization and economic reform of China.
These far-reaching effects will have very broad-ranged and deep-rooted implications on many aspects of our society. The policy to be adopted in the development of our RII and its integration into the NII and GII cannot be narrowly addressed by a lower level government agency nor restricted to a small number of agencies.
The regrouping of government functions involved in information technology under one Bureau Secretary will help in solving many of the problems that we are currently experiencing. The Hong Kong Computer Society welcomes such decision.
On this issues, we further recommend that:
It is worth noting that an Information Infrastructure Advisory Committee (IIAC) was set up by The Office of the Telecommunication Authority (OFTA) in March, 1997 with the intention to bring some of the issues involved in the RII construction into focus. However, many of the issues (Technology, Legal and Applications) that the IIAC attempts to address are beyond the jurisdiction, authority and expertise of the OFTA. Many of the officially appointed members of the Committee and Sub-committees found themselves in very ineffective and non-productive positions in dealing with these issues under the current IIAC committee charter, structure and meeting logistics. We do not recommend the automatic extension or expansion of the existing IIAC convened by the OFTA to become the Advisory Committee that we have outlined.
Conclusion
The Hong Kong Computer Society is prepared to offer assistance, the professional time and services of its members in discussing the details of issues and suggestions outlined in this paper with the appointed Bureau Secretary coordinating the Information Technologies related issues. The recommendations that we have put forth are not intended to be exhaustive.
It is, however, important for us to recognize that we cannot afford to wait much longer and continue to worship the outdated principle of positive non-intervention and laissez faire without raising some pointed questions. This long-held principle will prove to be detrimental to Hong Kong on the construction of a major social infrastructure needed to ensure our success into the next century.
Hong Kong needs to take decisive actions in policies related to the development of a comprehensive Information Infrastructure and associated industrial components to ensure our success into the future as an SAR under China.
We are encouraged by the Chief Executive's Policy Speech outlining some of the initiatives, including the stimulation of new technology industries, the integration of IT into primary and secondary schools and the regrouping of government functions to bring focus into the IT related areas. These actions are welcomed by our professional organization. When they are skillfully orchestrated under the various government departments with the support form the private sectors, we are confident that Hong Kong will continue as a viable and sustainable economic force into the next century.