Speech by Mr. Howard C Dickson, Government Chief Information Officer, at Hong Kong Computer Society 35th Anniversary Dinner cum Hong Kong International Computer Conference 2005 Dinner
24 - 11 - 2005

Paul (Chow), Sunny (Lee), Michael (Leung), Distinguished Guests, Colleagues, Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you for inviting me to the Hong Kong Computer Society's 35th Annual Dinner.

Presumably you invited me as one of the few surviving IT warriors from 1960s who can recall computing 35 Years ago when your organization was founded.

You have probably never heard of Gamma 10s, English Electric Leo Marconi System 3, the KDF9, Digital 11/70s, Univac 1108s and hope to never see Algol, Fortran, RPG and Cobol again.

I can recall when the prospect of an IBM 158 being available on your wrist was seen as irresponsible future fantasy. You have likely not experienced the joys of unit record equipment, card sorters, Kimble Tag readers, paper tape readers and reels of magnetic tape.

For me the wake-up call was not so much technology but working on an engineering design team for a new electricity generating station where the mechanical, electrical, civil engineers worked in separate silos without any process for integrating their work or managing change.

People from a wide range of academic backgrounds staffed the information technology industry in 1970.

As I am speaking among friends, let me suggest that the people of Information Technology have made a profound effect on society.

1. We have dared to ask why, how and why not. When the accountants resisted, we learned accounting.
2. When Human Resources were reluctant, we learned payroll.
3. When the railroad was going broke, we learned about car accounting and freight marketing.
4. When goods delivery was hit and miss, we learned about supply chain management.
5. When the warehouses lacked focus, we learned inventory management.
6. When we saw an opportunity for more available banking service, we learned the various components of financial services.
7. When the returns from IT were marginal, we learned about channel management.

Over the years, we have discovered that the ability to process and provide connectivity to consumers and businesses alike, has transformed our society.

Along the way we have faced unending technological innovation. We have readily moved on from earlier technologies and the changing economics of processing, storage and communications.

We have seen numerous fads come and go. Some became essential to our future (Paging, RDBMS, Enterprise Resource Management systems, Systems Development Methodologies, object design and programming) while others fell by the way side (Overlays, push-down stacks, CASE tools come to mind) until a more superior technology emerged. We have learned to embrace the new and move on from the legacy technologies.

The next stage, as we have started to hear over the past few days is one where we delegate our proven IT capabilities to service providers while we move our attention to Information Management.

I use this term instead of Knowledge Management since we are just at the beginning of making information relatable and sharable across systems, a company, an industry, a country or even the whole international community.

The Health and the Accounting communities are on their way with SNOMED, HL7 and as we have heard from Louis Matherne, with XBRL.

In moving forward, we will need immense diplomatic skills as we negotiate standards across cultures that will make the progress we have made in reaching smart card and credit card standards seem trivial.

So it is just another area for IT people to learn as we advance this technology to aid some of society's most entrenched challenges.

As you are, I am proud to have spent my career in advocating and implementing the changes that IT has enabled and empowered.

So please join me in raising a glass for the IT profession in Hong Kong as we get ready to evolve again, taking our hats off to the past but rolling up our sleeves for the future in Information Management and beyond.

So let's Toast the IT profession in Hong Kong and the Hong Kong Computer Society.

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"Cher cher gur way"
"Doje go(t) whyeé"

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