Speech by Mr. Alan Wong, Director of Information Technology Services at the "ITSD Networking Hour"
01 - 12 - 2003

Mr John Tsang, Secretary for Commerce, Industry and Technology, Friends from the IT Industry and Profession, Colleagues, Ladies and Gentlemen,

Good afternoon! Welcome to the 2003 ITSD Networking Hour. We are very honoured to have Mr John Tsang, Secretary for Commerce, Industry and Technology, on this occasion as our Guest of Honour. John has also kindly agreed to give us a speech, but before I invite him to do so, I would like to take this opportunity to speak briefly on three major projects that ITSD is working on which you may be interested to know.

Outsourcing

We are committed to a vigorous outsourcing policy in the implementation of the e-Government programme. In order to speed up the procurement of IT products and services, we have adopted a Standing Offer Agreement (SOA) approach. Last year, we launched the Information Technology Professional Services Arrangement (ITPSA) in June which had substantially widened the choice of contractors for government departments. In the last 15 months, 271 projects and service work assignments at a total value of $216 million have been commissioned under the ITPSA. Nearly 90% of them were commissioned within 40 working days, and 46% started within 20 working days. With regard to IT products, a couple of months ago we launched a new series of SOAs on the supply of server systems and related services, which complement the SOAs on PC/LAN, mainframe computers and the Backbone Network. Last month, just 2 weeks ago, we moved to a new stage of our IT outsourcing programme: SOAs for our data centres, which are labelled as Information Systems Hosting Service (ISHS). The ISHS is aimed to enable government departments to outsource the management and operation of their new information systems that are located in ITSD's data centres. Next year, we will further extend the scope of the outsourcing programme to the dozens of computer and information systems currently hosted in our data centres. This is one of our major tasks in the next two years in view of the complexity involved. However, we are convinced that our IT industry is potentially capable and reliable to take over and manage our data centres under an outsourcing arrangement as it does in the supply of IT products and services.

Wireless Technology

We believe that next year is going to be a big year for wireless technology which will provide new channels and platforms for enterprise applications. I refer to the use of mobile phones with data processing and transmission capabilities, e.g. the 2.5G and in due course 3G mobile phones, and laptops with inbuilt WiFi (or wLAN) capability. The number of 2.5G mobile phones has reached 536,000 which is still growing at double digits monthly. A year ago, there were only 109,000 users! As a critical mass of terminals is in place, there will be real motivation for the wireless technology industry to develop content and applications for deployment at enterprise level. The Information Infrastructure Advisory Committee appointed a working group in last summer to assess the present situation and prospects of the wireless technology industry as an integral part of enterprise information systems, together with the interested parties. The Working Group has concluded that the time has come for business enterprises and government departments to consider seriously the integration of wireless technology in their corporate information systems, and that the Government should take a lead as it has so successfully done in the e-Government programme under the Digital 21 Strategy. I will personally take up this task, and a Task Force involving the wireless technology industry, the IT industry and the Wireless Development Centre at Cyberport (which incidentally will be officially opened 2 weeks later by Mr John Tsang) to work out an action plan for the promotion of wireless technology and services and to monitor the implementation of the plan. Ubiquitous computing, meaning we can carry out e-transactions truly anytime anywhere, is here to stay.

XML Management Framework

By the end of this year, nearly 90% of public services amenable to electronic delivery will have an e-option. The next stage of the e-Government programme will focus on joined up projects involving horizontal integration of business processes and their underlying information systems across departments in service delivery. As stated in the public consultation paper on the 2004 Digital 21 Strategy, we have already started work on several projects of this kind, for example, the Integrated Criminal Justice System and the Business Entry Portal. To facilitate process integration, interoperability of data and systems is a pre-requisite.

You may recall that last year we published the Interoperability Framework (or IF in short) that sets out the interface and data exchange standards to facilitate joined-up e-government services. We have made considerable progress in developing the technical standards for deployment of web services by aligning the data definition and representation of commonly used data elements into data standards. We have identified certain Common Schemas and work is in hand to define them. A number of departments have also taken the initiative to define Project Schemas as well. Last week, we have launched our XML Schema Design and Management Guide which sets out a methodology for designing XML based data exchange interface, and a framework for government-wide alignment of data definition and data representation. In developing the XML management framework, we have consulted many experts in the IT profession, and I would like to take this opportunity to thank them for their valuable contribution. Our partners and contractors in the IT industry should keep abreast of developments in this important area because the use of interoperable data standards and XML schemas is going to be the basis of many G2G and G2B systems and projects.

I am afraid that I have talked too much about ITSD already. Last but not least, we will continue to work closely with the IT industry, the wireless technology industry, the IT professional bodies and industry associations, the higher education institutions, and the social services agencies that are concerned about the digital divide problem as well as government departments to pursue together the various strategic goals under the Digital 21 Strategy for the betterment of the well-being of Hong Kong. Now may I invite Mr John Tsang to speak to us.

Thank you.

- END -