Dreaming of political change

DON SAMBANDARAKSA

Election time is almost upon us, a time when outrageous promises tend to be made (fixing Bangkok's traffic problems was a particular promise that never materialised). Unfortunately, politicians tend to spend more time learning how to make promises that they can later wriggle out of rather than studying the state of the art as to what can actually be done.

Bit if I were a politician, here are some of the promises I would be making today, backed up with a plan on how to get them done through technology. And if someone asked me to write them a political speech (again), it might come out something like this.

Friends, Romans, countrymen: my party shall increase the agricultural output of the country by one third and thus uplift the quality of life for all the poor farmers. No, this is not one of those crazy promises - it can be done, ladies and gentlemen, through the use of technology.

IBM, a high-tech name we all know well, has a project they are working on, Big Green. It is an environmental project aimed very much at saving the world. One of the projects they are working on is a sensor network for rivers. By knowing exactly how much water is flowing where and when throughout a region, the nice people at IBM have told me that they can optimise water usage and increase agricultural output by 30 percent.

That is the theory and, my dear constituents, if I am elected to power, I will tell IBM to run their pilot here with the full backing of my government. Why tinker with projects in New Zealand when you can make a real difference to lives here, I will ask them. Our country is, unlike much of the region, still an agrarian society and providing people a 30 percent boost will help protect our traditional way of life and prevent the insidious urbanisation that is ripping apart the very fabric of society today.

(Note to speaker. One-third sounds better than the 30 percent promised, and I am sure that they will forget the three percent come re-election time.)

Ladies and gentlemen, one of the projects mooted by the previous elected administration was the promise of e-government. Elect me and I will make e-government happen and, unlike my forebears, I will make you see the benefits of it rather than just having a useless token in your wallet. E-governance is all about transparency, about bringing the best business practices of flexibility and agility to the workplace and helping our two million civil servants work better. It is not about replacing people through automation, but about helping them perform their job better; about helping them help you, the taxpayer.

E-governance is all about visibility. Today we see successions of governments in a reactionary, almost PR-led mode. Where else in the world would you have the Finance Minister talking about putting taxes on god amulets rather than working on policy? We need to prioritise, but before that can be done, we need to know what it is we are dealing with.

As a priority, I will tell my ICT Minister to forget about the big money telecom sector and leave it to the NTC. I will tell him to focus on the much more important task of understanding how government works and reengineering it with modern engineering practices. This means conducting a government-wide survey of all the data elements in use and creating a map of how each element feeds into each process. Only then can we break down silos, reengineer government and better serve you.

My dear voters, this will be an invisible task for the first few years. Just identifying all the data elements will take a year, understanding how they fit together will take at least another. But I can promise you that, come the third year of my government, we will know what is happening and where. I will have visibility. My ministers will have visibility. You will have visibility into how your tax money is spent. Bear with me, and the future will be bright.

Elect me, and in four years I will promise to cut red tape by more than half. Government is not about making officials feel powerful, it is about making the country powerful, and that means allowing you, my dear voter, to spend time working rather than dealing with red tape.

I will bring in HP, another name we all know well, not for their computers, but for their expertise in ITIL, the IT Infrastructure Library. My dear constituents, if you think that running a country is tough, and believe me it is tough, you should see the total chaos of running a data centre.

HP has a five-day course on how to prioritise and how to make sense out of chaos. I will make that ITIL course required for all my ministers and senior civil servants. Rather than focusing on the latest lack of toilets at Cobra Swamp airport, we will have metrics and a clear methodology of what action will result in the greatest benefit to you, my dear voter, and I promise to share those metrics with you so that you can see why we are doing what we are doing.

Visibility, be it in e-government or a data centre, helps remove the fear, uncertainty and doubt. With visibility, my ministers can act rather than react; work rather than explain.

Vote for me and by the time I run for reelection again, we shall overtake Singapore as the most efficient government in the region. (maybe)

My dear voters, for industry, I want you to celebrate what is Thai. Today Thailand is the world's largest manufacturer of hard drives, yet all too many people cringe when they see the Made in Thailand badge. If we do not stand tall and proud with our drives, then how can we have an industry? My dear voters, Thailand's brand is not the trinkets and commemorative items of OTOP, it is the IT industry. I will celebrate the production of hard drives and reward those who make them.

AMD used to have a factory here but they sold it off. Come back. Your name is still on a bridge out there, I will ask you to build more. More bridges. More chips. More flash memory. The base is still here, the goodwill is still here. We need to build on that success rather than let it fade into distant memory, a footnote in history.

Ladies and gentlemen, vote for me and I will make intellectual property a term we can be proud of as a generator, not something we cringe when someone mentions that they have patented something our people have been using for generations. Lack of IPR enforcement means that today we have killed off a new generation of IP generators before they even start. Who dreams of building great software if they know it will be stolen? Strong IP laws will help protect us, not hinder development.

My fellow countrymen, under my guidance, Thailand will take its rightful place as a software development hub. People want to live and work here. The software development model today does not understand the word company or corporation. How can a developer working on software by the beach afford the legal infrastructure to get a work permit? They cannot. Today they are forced to hide or can only stay as low paid teachers. By adjusting our immigration policies to understand the distributed development model, I am sure we will get the best and brightest brains working and living here.

I could go on, but somehow I think that by the time I reach this part of my speech, the room will be largely empty as most will have got up and left. Well, maybe in a couple of decades I can try again. Then again, I could always go back into writing speeches again.