Congratulatory Speech by Mr. Jeremy Godfrey, Government Chief Information Officer at the "15th Congregation of the Department of Computing, Faculty of Engineering of Hong Kong Polytechnic University"

3 November 2009

It is a great pleasure to congratulate you all on the occasion of your graduation.

I also need to congratulate on the wise choice you made a few years ago, when you decided to study computing.

Some of you may go into research or teaching. Some of you may become IT professionals. Some of you will pursue a more general business career. Whatever your choice, there are several reasons why your knowledge of computing will be an asset.

In the first place, an understanding of computing is almost a prerequisite for a financially rewarding career. According to Forbes Magazine, three of the world’s four richest men owe their fortunes to ICT. But you do not have to become a billionaire to find IT knowledge a significant career asset. In today’s fast-changing and global world, organisations must constantly adapt the way they work to improve their customer satisfactions, and to reduce their unit costs. Almost all change nowadays is underpinned by IT, It is impossible to do a good job as a leader of any organisation without the knowledge and imagination to transform business through the use of IT.

That brings me to a second reason for studying computing. IT is never boring. Technology changes fast. I bought my first computer in 1978. It had 8 K of RAM and a cassette tape recorder for long-term storage. Nowadays, my office desktop has 3 gigabytes of RAM – which is more than all the memory in all the personal computers sold worldwide in 1978.

In the past 10-15 years, we have seen an explosion in the use of the Internet, transforming the world of work, of education and of government. Now we are in a second revolution, where consumer-generated content and mobility are transforming the way communities interact, and is beginning once again to change other aspects of our lives. The poor old world wide web is only a teenager, but it already is being described as the “traditional Internet” to distinguish it from the exciting world of Web 2.0.

But the most important reason for studying and applying IT is that it makes a difference to the world. IT transforms the lives of people in developed economies. For instance in Hong Kong, millions of people everyday use Octopus cards to make their journey to work – or their purchase of a cup of coffee – a little more convenient. Many of us use Facebook or Skype to keep in touch with family and friends, locally and overseas. And we use various forms of digital TV – broadcast, cable and broadband – to view a wide variety of content.

And IT is continuing to help create the future. In the area of healthcare, every country in the world is challenged by the problem of unlimited demand for healthcare services, but only finite resources to deliver it. Improving the productivity of the healthcare system doesn’t save money: it saves lives. In Hong Kong, we are addressing this issue by expanding the role of the private sector in delivering healthcare, with more patients seeing specialists in public hospitals for initial diagnosis but with follow-up and monitoring carried out by practitioners of family medicine.

To make this happen, we need to enable information to flow efficiently amongst healthcare providers, but only with the consent of the patient. We already can share information within the public hospitals – in fact Hong Kong has the world’s largest cluster of hospitals with a single patient record. Now we are building an electronic health record sharing infrastructure to extend sharing to private practitioners, laboratories and diagnostic centres. Not only will this make our healthcare system more productive, it will also help patients directly, by reducing the need for repeated tests and reducing medical errors caused by unnoticed allergies and drug interactions.

It is not just in Hong Kong and other developed economies that IT makes a difference. In Bangladesh, the Nobel prizewinning economist Mohammed Yunnus has transformed lives through setting up Grameen Bank to offer micro-credit to help lift the population out of poverty. He has also set up a mobile phone company, lending money to entrepreneurs to buy one phone and use it to provide a public calling service in remote villages. Because the income levels in Bangladesh are so low, the company has to cope with tiny top-ups of pre-paid credit to mobile phone accounts. This means that Grameen phone has one of the most advanced and innovative pre-paid billing systems in the world. The Grameen phone business is not just transforming the lives of the entrepreneurs who run the public call offices. It also transforms the lives of farmers who can now obtain better information about weather, crop prices and growing techniques.

I hope you won’t mind if I offer some advice on how you can best apply your IT knowledge in the workplace.

Most of the employers I talk to agree that the key difference that marks out a really valuable IT employee is that he or she never loses sight of the reason why IT is being used. He is curious about the challenges that the organisation is facing, and is able to propose and deliver creative ways in which IT can address the challenges.

To live up to this ideal, you will need to become a lifelong learner. Many of you will soon leave the world of education for the world of work. But your education is far from over. You will need to keep up to date about developments in IT. You will need to learn about the organisation you work for, and the sector it is in. You will need to develop your communication skills, your business skills and your influencing skills.

The Government will help you to continue your personal development. We have established a Qualification Framework with defined standards of qualifications and clear indication of development paths. We are also working with academia, industry, and professional bodies to sponsor the development of specific professional qualifications for IT professionals.

I encourage you all to plan your personal development, and to acquire appropriate professional certifications, so you can demonstrate your capabilities to employers and clients.

To conclude, let me congratulate you once again on your graduation. I wish you every good fortune for your future development and your future career.

- ENDS -