Central Government

Hong Kong GCIO in conversation

By James Smith | 9 October 2008

Jeremy Godfrey, appointed Hong Kong’s Government Chief Information Officer earlier this year, met up with James Smith for a chat. This is an abridged selection of his comments.

What is it that the public sector is trying to achieve – and you need to use appropriate technology to meet those goals. You need to remain abreast of what technologies are available.

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Although I started my career in the public sector as a civil servant with the Department of Trade and Industry in the United Kingdom, my involvement in e-government stretches back 10 years. I came to Hong Kong in 1989 and worked for Hong Kong Telecom and then Cable & Wireless.

A decade ago I went into consulting and did a lot of work on e-commerce strategy, working with government organisations like the Hong Kong Trade Development Council. I helped the Hutchison Communications and Compaq team write their successful bid for operating the Hong Kong government’s ‘Electronic Service Delivery’ (ESD) portal. Following this I then did work on the second wave of e-government strategy in Hong Kong – so although I have been in the private sector for 20 years, I have had a lot of insight into how government works.

One of the things I have always admired is people who can combine a business career with public service – Hong Kong is very fortunate it has a lot of people who have done that. I have always wanted to contribute to the community, and this is an opportunity to contribute very directly – I hope that my background and experience will complement the work that needs to be done.

In public sector one of the biggest challenges is how you outline the IT programme of government with policy objectives. IT can enable people to meet their

The IT function can’t wait passively for users to suggest technology – you need to be able to use your knowledge of technology to propose to users what can be changed to make things work more effectively.

Doing some experimentation – if you look at Web 2.0 we’ve used some of these technologies a bit, such as blogs. Haven’t used a wiki, but I think it would be interesting to put a consultation document up as a wiki, and invite them to comment directly, to turn the consultation process from a series of bilateral conversations with each stakeholder, to a collective debate between stakeholders, and then draw insights from observing the debate. When there are hard choices to be made about priorities, using wikis could be a good way to find common ground between multiple parties.

However there is not much point in using a wiki if the people who are consulted are not accustomed to using that technology – so for me to use it when I’m consulting the IT sector makes a lot of sense. But it is going to be less useful if you’re using it to consult a less IT-enabled group of stakeholders. Clearly in this whole area of e-government and e-business, in a sense almost everything is an experiment – and by the time a technology has proven itself, it is often obsolete as well.

The role of the private sector Government here in Hong Kong is a reasonably extensive user of IT, both in its customer-facing processes and its back end processes – but there is certainly room for much more. We have to find the areas where there is the greatest value – you tend to find departments where their volume of business has grown very rapidly, and because their resources don’t grow as fast and they have a real need to improve their productivity – you have to align those policy objectives.

No question that there is a wide variety of skills and creativity that you can get from the private sector – the reason to engage with the private sector is as much to engage with global expertise, and it has also done a lot to improve the health of the local industry – rather than the government effectively.

I admire the innovation I’ve seen from Google, Amazon and Microsoft for that matter – all the companies that have done transformational things. I admire very much some companies who have got fantastic reputations for customer service, whether delivered online or not. The ability to create a culture and systems to deliver that is very impressive – that comes from the very top.

Because the government is a very significant user of IT services - so rather than monopolise it in house, it has been very positive for the industry that we have outsourced a lot of systems development. It is not a question of cost, but value for money – trying to manage the excess of value over cost.

Decentralised vs. centralised I have observed what Singapore is doing with their Standard Operating Environment (SOE) projects with interest, but we’re approaching some of the same issues in a slightly different way. We certainly think it is important that the way that information is managed has more structure around it. As the currency of government has moved away from paper to digital, then the way that digital information is managed and protected and authenticated becomes much more important, becomes an increasingly important issue.

So we have embarked on an electronic information management strategy – compared to Singapore we probably feel that government is a hugely diverse enterprise with so many different needs. We have 150,000 civil servants, doing social work, supplying water, developing policy, running clinics, managing IP. So it is unlikely that we would be able to define a standard operating environment that would work for every department – and unlikely to be able to define a SOE that wouldn’t result in compromises for certain departments.

The idea of having one monolithic answer for everybody – I’m not sure we’re competent enough to know what that should be. I just think that government is just too diverse.