Challenges Grow To Ict Asian Hub Status

[george]

Challenges grow to ICT Asian hub status

BANGKOK: -- Thailand's ambition to be Asia's regional hub of Information, Communication and Technology (ICT) is far-fetched given the country's place in both the regional and international context, a leading research house said.

As Thailand attempts to scale the mountain to gain the stated goal of regional ICT leadership, not even one in four persons uses a computer, and slightly more than one in 10 use the internet.

The mountain appears to be getting bigger instead of smaller, it indicated. Instead of rising, the kingdom's competitive status is falling.

Kasikorn Research Centre said Sunday that only a big push from both the public and private sectors would make that dream come true, judging from the track record of slow and gradual growth of Thailand's ICT industry.

Two indicators of Thailand's sluggish pace are the nation's 12 per cent level of internet penetration and 22 per cent computer use among its population.

Regarding competitiveness in the ICT field, the ranking by the Institute of Management Development of 61 countries worldwide, Thailand ranked 32nd in 2006, dropping five notches from 27 in 2005. Thailand also fared badly in terms of basic ICT infrastructure.

In its analysis of Thailand's position vis a vis its pronounced ambition to be the regional ICT hub, Kasikorn Research Centre said Thailand is at a fledgling level of growth and growth is likely to be gradual.

Moreover the country does not have the skills and capacity required to grow its domestic ICT industry.

Thailand will remain dependent on imported technology both software and hardware, it said.

In order to stimulate growth of ICT use and related domestic industry and to remove the many obstacles to growth, tremendous push from both the public and private sectors will be required, said the research house.

--TNA 2006-08-07

[Lannig]

Challenges grow to ICT Asian hub status

BANGKOK: -- Thailand's ambition to be Asia's regional hub of Information, Communication and Technology (ICT) is far-fetched given the country's place in both the regional and international context, a leading research house said.

As Thailand attempts to scale the mountain to gain the stated goal of regional ICT leadership, not even one in four persons uses a computer, and slightly more than one in 10 use the internet.

The mountain appears to be getting bigger instead of smaller, it indicated. Instead of rising, the kingdom's competitive status is falling.

You bet... at least this information goes uncensored now, that's nice.

As an IT professional who's been working in this country for 7 years, I have lost any hopes of finding competent and professional Thai staff here. I've trained dozens of Thai engineers, and apart from one case I can remember of (the guy's now working in Australia) I've found their unability/unwillingness to learn, structure their minds, acquire solid knowledge and professional behaviour quite discouraging.

Why that? well, I'm not suggesting that thais are inherently unable to be good IT people. I can see two main reasons for this:

1) the language barrier - can you believe that fresh IT graduates from Chula or Kaset Sart can't read (and understand) any english-langugage technical documentation and even much less write any? I've seen quite a few of them joining the place I used to work. All the same. How long will it take until learning English is taken seriously here? Recently I had to chat with a Mathayom 6 English teacher, and I soon found out that my Thai was better than her English, so we switched to that language. My Thai isn't good at all... and I don't teach Thai!

2) a cultural problem - IT being a technical matter has no value in the eyes of students in higher education. They all dream of becoming "managers" and real IT work is considered as (yuck!) "real, hands-on" work, somethings that their culture despises.

When they graduate in the IT field, they don't try to acquire any technical expertise at all. Their only aim is to get to a nontechnical position as soon as possible.

Oh... and I work in a higher education institution now, after having worked for a major ISP.

--Lannig

[baboon]

A guy I used to know was part of a team installing signalling equipment somewhere in Thailand and according to him, the rows he ended up in....

"Stationmaster, dont wave that green flag at the driver.You have colour light signalling now."

"Its the rules."

"You could quite possibly mislead the driver into passing a red light."

"Its the rules..."

Ho hum.

[astral]

The lack of adequate international bandwidth is also a major draw back.

1) the language barrier - can you believe that fresh IT graduates from Chula or Kaset Sart can't read (and understand) any english-langugage technical documentation and even much less write any? I've seen quite a few of them joining the place I used to work.

It appears Thailand has gone backwards in this respect.

When I started work in Thailand back in 1985, the basic English skills were in place with the graduates, they just lacked confidence.

Reading was already there and working with me both spoken and written skill soon dropped into place.

[OldAsiaHand]

Challenges grow to ICT Asian hub status

BANGKOK: -- ..... Instead of rising, the kingdom's competitive status is falling.

Let's see then, less than zero would be.......

[Scott]

I am a bit of a techno-twit myself, however, this explains why it is so hard to get things done here. Where I work, it is our Filipino staff--employed for entirely different reasons--that end up doing a lot of the computer work (fixing problems etc.).

[naka]

Now now ... ther'e more to be pitied than chided.

Naka.

[Plus]

I like that guy in BP Database who writes "Open thought" column. "IT hub" has long been politicised and there's nothing worse than politicians messing with science. IT development here is rife with spectacular failures like Smart ID card that was screwed entirely by politicians.

Also they'll never be able to put infrastructure in place if they can't sort out simple bureaucratic procedures, like establishing National Broadcasting Commission and National Telecommunications Commission. One is crippled without another. Granted they are not exactly IT field, but CAT has had a monopoly on Internet bandwidth until very recently. Failed EGAT privatisation means that fiber optic cables on its land won't be laid any time soon.

There are people appearing working hard at SEPA, but what have they got to show for it? Thailand still doesn't have a decent Thai-English dictionary for example. That means people get no help when surfing pages outside Thailand.

WIthout it, English proficiency is very very important, but Thais concentrate on translating software instead, and they can never catch up with ever growing number of programs, both commercial and open source. They can't even play games as they don't understand controls and instructions! So this so called IT hub lives isolation from the rest of IT world.

Basically they have to scale their ambitions down and learn to walk before flying.