“IT For All, All For IT” should be national motto and thrust of a national campaign for every Malaysian to be part of the emerging Information Society

The Yang di Pertuan Agong, in the Royal Address, said:

“The development of the Multi-Media Supercorridor is among the most important efforts undertaken by the Government this year. It ranks among Malaysia’s greatest efforts to master the information technology: a field which will greatly influence the course of future world progress. The Multi-media Supercorridor offers a specially designed conducive environment to facilitate new methods of interaction between entrepreneurs and companies to gain benefits offered by the Information Era. This year will also witness efforts being taken to initiate the development of Cyberjaya city and the Multimedia University within this corridor. Hence, we appeal to everyone from all levels of the society to make the Multimedia Supercorridor a successful project because we do not want to be left behind in mastering the information technology.”

IT is MSC and MSC is IT?

When the Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Dr. Mahathir Mohamed gave a two-and-a-half-hour long briefing and dialogue session with Barisan Nasional leaders on social ills and the Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) on March 11, a newspaper reported that although the MSC was explained at length by the Prime Minister, only one question on the MSC was asked from the floor - reflecting their poor grasp of the subject.

I would not be too wrong if I say that the prevalent perception among Malaysians is that IT and MSC are synonymous, and that when the government talks about promoting IT, it is nothing more than about promoting MSC. How can ordinary Malaysians be faulted when even MPs virtually equate IT development with MSC as reflected by the fact that although there is a total of 74 questions on the MSC in the current 26-day meeting, and apart from 32 questions on computer education in schools which overlap with the MSC flagship application of “smart schools”, there are very few questions about the Information Technology (IT).

This seems to constitute the crux of the problem about the National IT Agenda, to confuse the part for the whole, as however important and ambitious the RM5 billion MSC project, it can only be a part and not be the whole of the National IT Agenda.

The MSC may be the crown jewel of the National Information Infrastructure (NII) which Malaysia must build if we are to make the transition to the Information Society, but it is not the NII - which in the widest definition, would include four components, namely: (I) telecommunications networks; (ii)computer systems, televisions, fax machines, telephones and other information appliances; (iii) software, information services and databases; and (iv) trained people who can build, maintain and operate these systems.

The Seventh Malaysia Plan, presented to Parliament in May last year, referred to a IT national action plan to be formulated by the National Information Technology Council (NITC) to “chart the necessary steps to promote the development of Malaysia into an IT hub and will outline the scope, size and schedule of plans and programmes as well as identify the necessary infrastructure support in terms of education and training. The plan will also identify the undertakings and contributions of both the public and private sector.”

It has been said that a human year is about five Internet years, and this would mean that we have lost about five Internet years and have not yet finalised the national IT plan.

This delay in finalising the National IT plan should not continue. Singapore took nine months to finalise its IT2000 Plan in 1991 - its vision to be “among the first countries in the world with an advanced nationwide information infrastructure” - which stood out from other information technology plans from its very beginning as it was conceived at a time when the Internet itself had yet to become a widespread tool for information retrieval.