Open Malaysia

This is certainly exciting news as we move into 2007! About 14 governments will be involved and Malaysia will surely be able to play an active role.

Press release from UNDP:
UNDP, IBM and Oracle to Help Asia-Pacific Countries Create Strategies and Policies for Adopting Open Computing Standards

Excerpt:

BANGKOK, 19 December 2006 - United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), IBM and Oracle today announced a joint research initiative to help Asia-Pacific countries share and create strategies, blueprints and policies for adopting the right blend of open standards and technology services. The goal will be for more countries to develop universally compatible applications and networks to make internal and external government services and transactions more automatic, affordable and efficient.

The UNDP Asia-Pacific Development Information Programme (UNDP-APDIP) will facilitate the development of Government Interoperability Frameworks (GIFs). Many countries around the world have developed GIFs to guide the development of government-wide systems and policies that permit electronic transactions and data and information exchange to take place seamlessly across agencies and jurisdictions.

Today, many e-Government initiatives show that new systems are very often developed from scratch at both central and local levels. New systems are developed with specifications and solutions that match goals and tasks relevant to a particular administration, but without adequate attention to surrounding government institutions and information and communications technology (ICT) systems. The result is a patchwork of ICT solutions that are not always compatible with each other, reduced efficiency and duplication of effort.

UNDP-APDIP, IBM and Oracle, together with the International Open Source Network (IOSN), have teamed up to conduct a thorough review of how governments in the region and beyond are promoting efficient, government-wide sharing of information and data by focusing on automatic technology services provided by computing networks, rather than individual technologies. For instance, this project will examine how existing GIFs are focused on a service-oriented architecture.

The objective is to identify promising practices around interoperability, then document case studies of those practices in action, and ultimately develop and recommend guidelines. Over the next year, UNDP-APDIP will hold workshops to share experiences and findings of the project with interested groups, and publicly release studies and reports at various stages of the project.

Project description

Excerpt:

Government Interoperability Frameworks: A Project Proposal

UNDP-APDIP, with support from IBM and Oracle, is proposing to implement a project that will:

• Conduct a review and analysis of whether and how existing GIFs are focused on a service-oriented approach and on open and/or proprietary standards, and identify promising practices on interoperability achieved based on Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) or Open Standards adoption.
• Prepare, publish and promote a “best practice” template/reference document that includes at least three e-government case-study featuring interoperability achieved based on SOA and/or Open Standards from at least three countries participating in this initiative.
• Prepare, in collaboration with the relevant national agency in three Asian countries a draft GIF based on an SOA approach and Open Standards.
• Prepare detailed interoperability implementation guidelines on 2 -3 specific citizen service areas such as National ID, Land Records, Tax etc.

Photo: Steve Wilkins, Director ISV & Developer Relations, IBM Asia Pacific, Voon Seng Chuan, Managing Director, IBM Malaysia and Rashmy Chatterjee, Director IBM Software Group ASEAN/South Asia officially launching the IIC

Voon Seng Chuan, Managing Director of IBM Malaysia during his welcome speech at the official launch of the IBM Innovation Center (IIC) for Business Partners yesterday emphasized that innovation (unlike invention) is more often done collaboratively with others than done alone, and IBM has chosen not to be in the business of developing software applications -- thus the IBM Innovation Center for Business Partners allows for such open innovation, to create and enhance solutions of joint clients of IBM and IBM's partners.

The press release for the launch is here.

The Star covered the launch as follows: IBM makes Malaysia Asean hub
Excerpts:

"IBM chose Malaysia due to the country's strong developer base and the excellent IT infrastructure and facilities here," he said after the opening of Kuala Lumpur ICC [should be IIC] yesterday.

Voon said the setting up of the ICC [should be IIC] in Malaysia to serve the Asean region was testimony to IBM’s commitment to support and collaborate with its business partners to generate more innovative solutions for their customers.

Sited at IBM Malaysia’s new office in Bandar Utama, the ICC [should be IIC] will provide the tools and hands-on support that will help IBM business partners to build, port and test their solutions and industrial applications on IBM hardware and software platforms.

It will also help IBM's business partners cut their development costs, shorten their sales cycle, leverage on innovation to compete and get their applications to market faster.

IBM also provides hands-on workshops and technical seminars to help developers update their technical skills on key IBM technologies.

On top of the workshops and seminars, the ICC [should be IIC] will also provide assistance on prototype and proof-of-concept development, porting and testing services, validation, integration testing, performance and scalability testing, technical support and secure remote virtual private network (VPN)...

...The Kuala Lumpur ICC [should be IIC] is one of IBM’s 32 ICCs [should be IICs] worldwide and the sixth in the Asia-Pacific after Seoul, Tokyo, Bangalore, Shanghai and Sydney.

The software platforms provided at the center includes Linux, the most exciting open source operating system that has been gaining acceptance by the the marketplace, including in Malaysia.  There is also emphasis on SOA (service oriented architecture) in the development of solutions by ISVs (independent software vendors) signing up at the IIC.

An earlier coverage of IBM Innovation Centers worldwide was by CIO Magazine:
IBM to Open Innovation Centers to Startups, VCs
Excerpt:

IBM can give startups free advice on how best to approach markets outside their home countries, for instance, how a company in China can sell its offerings in the U.S., Clark said. Startups also can talk to IBM’s technical architects either face-to-face in the centers or remotely from their phones or computers to take advantage of their specific areas of expertise.

Thus, another role of the IIC is to help partners go to market, locally and globally.

Other news coverage on the launch:

The Edge Daily: IBM opens first Asean Innovation Centre in KL
Excerpt:

The RM10 million investment included skilled resource, equipment, state-of-the-art facilities and networking

Business Times, The New Straits Times: IBM Innovation Center launched in KL
Excerpt:

IBM also provides business partners with resources to help them accelerate the development of open standards-based and small and medium business-focused solutions.

One thing which has become quite clear with the prolification of the Internet is that openness is now a business principle which has been made dominant. The rise of service oriented architectures, Web 2.0 (AJAX, XML-RPC and SOAP) for example could only be made possible if we're all interconnecting over standards based interfaces.

A closed model wouldn't work here as all we'd be doing would be to build inpenetrable silos of applications and information. There're so many different ways of doing this, mostly adhoc and undocumented, that the business applications people have come together to strategize on a common way of talking to each other. This is a Good Thing™ in more ways than one, and sends a very strong signal to the proprietary vertical applications people (SAP, Oracle) that they'd better buck up or see themselves being made irrelevant.

From a recent WiReD article,

One day in 1995, Marc Benioff, then a senior VP at Oracle, was trolling a new Web site called Amazon.com. He clicked on the Buy button, and a thought struck him: Applications on the Web were the opposite of Oracle’s bloatware. They executed transactions through a simple interface that was available to anyone on the Internet. Web standards made it unnecessary for customers to install, upgrade, or maintain anything but a browser and a TCP/IP connection. “I thought, ‘This is amazing,’ Benioff says. “I saw the power of an open-standard platform.”

Like Benioff, who went on to co-found Salesforce.com, many people have had the same epiphany. There is a clear understanding that only in aggregating all our guns into the same bunker can we exponentially multiply our business firepower[1]. The removal of these silos then become a critical factor in the effective utilization of the information bank, and the integration of a smooth and flawless user experience.

It's a simple epiphany, but one which has tremendous groundbreaking capability in refining our industry.

[1] A convoluted turn of phrase and mixed metaphors, but it's a lazy afternoon so the brain cells aren't too active.

CIO Asia Magazine August 2006 edition's cover story is
The Truth About SOA
"In which we pour some cold water on the hype and answer your questions about why, how and when you should (or should not) start thinking about implementing a service-oriented architecture."

Continuing from my previous post (part 1) on the MOSTI-IBM seminar on 15 August 2006 on Innovative Government Insights...

The three speakers, Krishna Giri, John Moran and Todd Ramsey delved into why innovation is important for the Government, what areas there needs to be innovation (including the two roles of Government in innovation) and how to be innovative.

Krishna presented the Global CEO Study 2006 but focused from the viewpoint of Public Sector, as the study did also interview Public Sector leaders. Three key themes emerged from the study:

1. Enhance existing capabilities and develop new business models
2. Collaborate and drive innovation
3. Integrate business and technology

Business models

Not only did the overall study find that business models matter, it matters even more for Public Sector (slide 9). The trend is that Governments are continually finding ways of operating differently. Outsourcing/shared services is one obvious choice Krishna mentioned. Other market-based examples listed by Krishna included competitive sourcing, public-private sector partnerships, competitive grants and auctions.

My comment is that the Malaysian Government, too, have explored several models, e.g. BOO (build, operate, own), but I recommend further reading of the source cited by Krishna, i.e. Six Trends Transforming Government:

• Trend 1. Changing rules
• Trend 2. Using performance management
• Trend 3. Providing competition, choice and incentives
• Trend 4. Performing on demand
• Trend 5. Engaging citizens
• Trend 6. Using networks and partnerships

MOSTI (Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation) and IBM Malaysia yesterday organized a half-day seminar on Innovative Government Insights, exploring the what's, why's and how's of innovation in the Public Sector, with the audience being mostly government officials and some members of academia.

In a previous post, remember I described my 9 August 2006 presentation (size 3MB) that included in it the Global CEO Study 2006? I emphasized the message from the study report that enterprises need to improve collaboration (internally, and increasingly externally) to innovate. I further linked open collaboration and open innovation to collaborative technologies as enablers. Those were my preamble to justify presenting collaborative technologies like open standards and SOA (service oriented architecture) as foundation to innovation. And of course in my presentation I went on to promote ODF (OpenDocument Format) as a key open standard to adopt now!

The Global CEO Study 2006 was featured by the first two of the three speakers in yesterday's MOSTI-IBM event, but before I describe all three presentations, let me first highlight the key messages in the opening speeches by Voon Seng Chuan, Managing Director, IBM Malaysia and Dato' Hanan Alang Endut, Secretary General, MOSTI.

Yesterday, I spoke at an event organized by my alma mater, UiTM (Universiti Teknologi MARA) -- the International Conference on Business IT 2006 (BIZIT '06): Collaborating with ICT Innovations for Business Survival at Crown Princess Hotel, Kuala Lumpur.

I presented on Innovation and Open Collaboration in ICT -- The Way Forward (size 3MB). Not a very original topic, is it, since Roslyn Docktor did present the same topic in May at another event, except that she had it as Innovation and Open Collaboration in ICT -- The Way Forward for Malaysia? Ah well, I thought it's a good topic that fits yesterday's event, so I used it again! So yes, much of what Roslyn presented I re-used for my presentation yesterday, plus also re-using the slides from the MNCC Evening Talk on ODF on 29 June 2006 and the Telehealth and E-Government Flagship Seminar on 10 July 2006.

Having been given 1 hour 15 minutes for my presentation, I had prepared a long presentation, only to find when I arrived that the organizers had changed the agenda for my presentation to be 45 minutes instead. I wish they'd told me beforehand, because I found myself having to rush through the last few slides!

In yesterday's presentation, I included a section to step back looking into open innovation and open collaboration, as a preamble before justifying the need for openness through open standards, SOA (service oriented architecture) and ODF (OpenDocument Format). How I presented the trend for open innovation and collaboration was to relate the findings of the Global CEO Study 2006 that IBM had conducted.

The study is clear on the message of how important it is for organizations to innovate by collaborating with others outside the organization, and how CIOs should then create a flexible  IT infrastructure for collaboration -- thus as a lead-in for the next part of my presentation: i.e. achieving that flexibility by using open standards and service oriented architecure.

Flagships and signposts -- oxymoronic, isn't it? Sea ships or star ships don't find signposts along the way!

Anyway, the flagships I refer to here are the MSC Malaysia Flagship Applications that were started almost as long ago as when MSC (Multimedia Super Corridor) was first conceived (that's 10 years ago). Signposts that I mean here are significant events that signal disruptive or dramatic change in technology evolution in the future.

MDeC (Multimedia Development Corporation) invited me to their Telehealth and E-Government Flagship Seminar  yesterday and today. Yesterday I was a Panel Speaker. Today I was the moderator for one of the three breakout workshop sessions.

The panel I was on was Panel 1 - Lessons Learnt From Flagships and the topic given to me was Technology Implementation (my presentation is here: .odp or .pdf). You can bet that I did not fail to include the "open" message in my presentation! I re-used many of the slides from the Evening Talk on ODF, except this time I made only a passing mention of ODF to illustrate open standards. But the passing mention was significant -- I said that the 2005 event of Massachusetts adopting ODF is a sure signpost that heralds the pervasiveness of "open" in the future. In less than a year after the Massachusetts decision, Mircrosoft announced its OpenXML format, more governments (like Denmark and Belgium) declared adoption of open standards or ODF, and Microsoft sprang another surprise last week to announce "support" for an ODF translator being develped in an open source environment.

In the presentation, I also introduced SOA (service oriented architecture). My full message on "open" was that  flagship applications can achieve integration and interoperability by adopting an open architecture (SOA) based on open standards. I also echoed the idea from fellow blogger, Dinesh that modules of flagship applications may even be developed using open source approach - especially because flagships are funded by taxpayers' money (our money) so the community should be given the opportunity in the deveopment.

It was heartening to hear the presentations from all three workshop groups having one of their recommendations being standards to be a must in the way forward for the flagships. The group I moderated explicitly recommended the SOA approach -- the participant who was championing this came from a state government and he emphasized the need for such an open architecture so that the applications that his state develops can connect/integrate/interoperate with the federal government flagship applications. The third group recommended something even more ambitious, i.e. to create what he called an interconnection layer (again based on open architecture and open standards) to integrate government flasgship applications with private sector applications -- not just for banking transactions but also for suppliers' and other external organizations' applications.

By the way, the concept of signposts to predict future technology came from the first part of my presentation (here: .odp or .pdf). If we can predict future technology (and I offered a methodology), we have better chance of adapting flagship applications ahead of future technology disruptions.

Photo: Bob Sutor

I have mentioned before the series by Bob Sutor on "Open Standards vs. Open Source" -- they are excellent pieces that put in perspective standards, open standards & open source and also the relevance to SOA (service oriented architecture).

Bob has just completed making the last two parts available on podcasts. So if you prefer listening to reading, below are the links:

Part 1: Standards -- text; podcast
Part 2: Software -- text; podcast
Part 3: Open Source Software -- text; podcast
Part 4: The Service Oriented Architecture Connection -- text; podcast

[Update 15 June 2006: see also Bob's entry on Downloading the podcasts for you to download for later playing/listening.]

Happy reading/listening!