Ken Wye Saw, Vice-President (Public Sector), Microsoft Asia Pacific, explains to Rahul Joshi the rationale behind Microsoft’s vision to make a “Real Impact for a Better Tomorrow” and the genuine willingness of governments in the region to help their citizens through investing in technology.
“If you ask ‘what does Microsoft stand for, and how does it help people?’ you’ll get a different answer depending on who you ask,” Ken remarks candidly.
Microsoft’s forays into consumer technology have been wide and deep: from championing desktop PC ubiquity to the
Windows Phone to the
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Ken Wye Saw, Vice-President (Public Sector), Microsoft Asia Pacific, explains to Rahul Joshi the rationale behind Microsoft’s vision to make a “Real Impact for a Better Tomorrow” and the genuine willingness of governments in the region to help their citizens through investing in technology.
“If you ask ‘what does Microsoft stand for, and how does it help people?’ you’ll get a different answer depending on who you ask,” Ken remarks candidly.
Microsoft’s forays into consumer technology have been wide and deep: from championing desktop PC ubiquity to the
Windows Phone to the
Xbox. While a unity of vision in its activities may seem uncertain to an outside observer, Ken firmly believes that in the past twenty years - ever since Microsoft drove to consumerise IT and put a computer in every home - its message and its activities have been consistent and focused on empowering individuals and corporations to realise their full potential. According to Ken, this has been their mission statement for quite some time.
"It’s good to look at the roots of the company: what do we stand for and where do we want to go? It’s about bringing IT to everyone, to organise lives better, to make communication and work easier. The outcome is that you’re making a real impact and you’re making a difference to lives,” he says.
Ken highlights education, healthcare and security as three of the main arenas in which value can be, and has been, demonstrably created.
“People say: ‘I get it: you’ve championed one-to-one learning, you’ve changed the learning ecosystem, you’ve helped train teachers and students and you’ve created future schools.’ That becomes real. The only way to change is not just to talk about it, but to show it,” Saw explains.
The Slow-Burn Revolution
When asked to name the one overriding priority that all developing nations should focus on in terms of ICT, Ken unreservedly and instantly replies: “Education”.
“Steeped in tradition, the student-teacher-classroom format has not changed for many years. The last thing you want to have is the exact same format, just with computers,” Ken comments.
Since Bill Gates identified Singapore’s
Crescent Girls’ School (CGS) in 2007 as an example for schools of the future around the world, the school has taken long strides in living up to its reputation. Already wired to support digital learning in 2004, the school introduced digital textbooks in 2010, which contain a degree of interactivity that suggests we are on the verge of a massive break from simply having soft-copy versions of textbooks as “digital textbooks.” CGS is a prominent member of
Microsoft’s Partners in Learning programme, and according to Ken, the interactions, the teaching and the collaboration within the school are perceptibly different because of IT. “You see students cluster together in learning. You see lesson plans change, the method of collaboration changes,” he observes.
Ken reminds us that it cannot happen overnight - education is a slow-burn revolution. “It takes time for it to catch on. You need different types of content such as live links, but will publishers make them? Only if there are consumers, so it’s a chicken-and-egg situation.”
Ken used to work with the
Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) of Singapore, then known as the National Computer Board. In 1993, he recounts that a project called “Student’s and Teacher’s Workbench”, which he had to opportunity to work on, was conceived. “We had this grand vision of changing the way curriculum was designed and the way people learn and consume information.”
The programme consisted of computer-aided instruction, which allowed for student self-learning as well as remote learning. Publishers were interested in content provision, but with 300 schools and 450,000 students, an average spend of $10 on a book would have amounted to a mere $4.5 million in total revenue - not enough to sustain an ecosystem. Ken said, “That’s the real challenge. It’s a part of making sure that innovation is sustainable - and for that it needs to be profitable, so it can pay for itself.”
Still, he believes that because of Singapore’s compactness and reach, the city-state does not have to undergo the same travails as a larger developing nation dealing with the problems of scale or of a large under-served population. Infrastructure in Singapore is already in place and the willingness to invest is robust. He compares its situation to Cambodia’s where he recently worked on a school with “350 students and eight teachers.”
“They don’t have running water. Comparatively, Singapore is in an enviable position, but now it’s about the execution. Can they drive the right things and connect? They are trying very hard and in these cases there is no silver bullet.”
Singapore has renewed its focus on reviewing school policies. The schools system is being revamped to focus more on understanding than on regurgitation, which was the legacy model inherited from the pre-Internet age.
While in the past the emphasis was on getting the right answer, the pedagogical environment facilitated by IT is slowly changing. And when it comes to abstract thinking, this emphasis would end up in classrooms full of ‘groupthink’. “In the modern world, there are no ‘right answers’ - you need a hypothesis, which needs to be tested and tried,” Ken opines.
The Rewards of Risk
“Ninety-nine out of 100 ideas will fail. The beauty of Silicon Valley is that people with twenty failed companies start their twenty-first! The young are sometimes naive, but it’s not always a bad thing - they will learn from both failure and success.”
Saw suggests two primary characteristics that make an environment suitable for innovation: adequate access to capital and a culture that is forgiving. The stigma of failure, he thinks, can prevent risk-taking, which is usually a characteristic of the young.
The agility of a young citizenry is often reflected in the agility of its companies, and SMEs are often the workhorses of emerging economies - with the added advantage of having no baggage and legacy systems to deal with. Saw believes that while large companies have their advantages, if they fail to incorporate new ideas and new ways of doing things, they may fall by the wayside. After this, it will be the time for smaller companies that have grown large in their turn to reinvent themselves: “Old ideas resurface and morph into new forms.”
When it comes to software, to look and learn, to adopt and adapt, Ken prescribes, is wiser than building infrastructure from scratch. “Someone, somewhere around the world has a solution that has worked,” he comments.
While government agencies often require very particular customisation, Ken believes they should think twice before dismissing commercial off-the-shelf software, which has been tested by millions worldwide.
“It may need to be tweaked, but there is continuous development. On the other hand, if the government custom develops something, the entire future of the system depends on its developers. If the developers leave, there will be trouble.”
Software architecture built 10 or 15 years ago evolved in a completely different environment compared to that of today, and the security challenges then were very different from the ones facing us now, according to Ken.
Both governments and the private sector are involved in making real, tangible impact on society. What was it like for Ken to move from the former to the latter?
“Moving from IDA to Microsoft was fun, because both are doing similar things. IDA believes in championing IT, and is very convinced that IT can change lives, increase productivity and improve government. Microsoft similarly really believes in technology and how it can change lives and impact people. I’ve taken on several different roles in Microsoft, but I’ve gone back to the public sector because it’s in my DNA,” he concludes with a chuckle.
Five Challenges, Five Opportunities facing governments, as Ken sees them
1) Connecting with the young. Governments acknowledge this, but are at a loss when it comes to implementation. It has brought to the surface the disconnect between the young and the old – and most of the government, however, is comprised of the latter. Connecting with the digitally savvy is in the minds of most government leaders.
2) Reacting quickly to global situations: something governments have seldom faced before. In the past, things didn’t happen overnight; these days, currency exchange rates fluctuate wildly. Now there is a need to figure out how to tweak things to stimulate the economy when the time comes.
3) Responding to the changing nature of threats. In the past, countries and their enemies were known. Now, the nature of the threat is often unclear, and how it manifests itself may no longer be physical but in the form of increasingly sophisticated cyber-intrusions.
4) Keep the economy competitive and create jobs. Will IT create new jobs or will it remove jobs? People can sometimes be led down the wrong path if they believe that IT will take away jobs. To some extent that may be true, but it will create a lot more jobs at the same time. The challenge is that for the jobs it removes, can the same workers be retrained to perform the new jobs that have been created?
5) Making do with less; driving for greater efficiencies; maximise every dollar spent.