Guest of honour is RADM(NS) Ronnie Tay, Chief Executive Officer of the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore.

Framework can help Singapore strategically manage its limited resources for sustainable development.

The Internet of Knowledge can be a strategic enabler for Singapore to compete in the knowledge economy. With connectivity as its fundamental building block and data at its core, the framework can help Singapore to strategically manage its limited resources for sustainable development, gain faster insights into new business opportunities in Asia, and compete on knowledge to drive productivity and innovation.

RADM(NS) Ronnie Tay, Chief Executive Officer of the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore, made this observation in his opening address at the Singapore Infocomm Technology Federation’s ICT Business Outlook Forum on 2 March 2010.

Within the Internet of Knowledge, business analytics and cloud computing can provide the ability to convey and process data to deliver high value “insights-on-demand” on Internet scale, said Mr Tay. These insights and knowledge, in turn, need to be presented in a way that can be easily understood and used. 

Mr Driek Desmet: Chief information officers have to “get into the real value-add” and help transform the business rather than occupy themselves with incremental initiatives.

This can be done through the Internet of Services, which is characterised by mobility, personalisation, location-sensing and productivity. For example, businesses in the retail sector can leverage insights on consumer spending patterns to enable highly targeted marketing, personalised consumer experience, as well as advanced forecasting, inventory and retail space optimisation. 

Moving from the Internet of Knowledge and Services to the Internet of Things, Mr Driek Desmet, Head of the McKinsey Business Technology Office in Asia, shared his insights into a new reality in which there will be RFID devices and smart metering, sensors built into everything, and networks everywhere. Businesses will have the ability to analyse everything because of the processing power that is now available, he said. And these, in turn, will change business models and the way companies work.

Spanish fashion retailer Zara, for example, makes use of real-time information to re-allocate slow moving stock while Japanese electronics giant Toshiba analyses production trends and shifts production to where its goods
are needed.

Chairman of the Business Outlook Forum’s organising committee Mr Lim Seng Kong delivers the Welcome Address.

With these developments, the role of IT has to shift from keeping the lights on to co-running the company. This requires a different way of thinking and an incorporation of the business dimension into IT, said Mr Desmet.

Chief information officers have to “get into the real value-add” and help transform the business rather than occupy themselves with incremental initiatives. And the starting point for doing this is to focus on the
customer experience.

Think of the customer first, redesign the business model around connectivity and create a way of working that is more networked both internally and externally, said Mr Desmet. Also have live monitoring in place, so that businesses can adapt to changes in the environment,
he added.

Other speakers at the Business Outlook Forum included Mr RJ Sridhar, Deputy Head of South Asia, JAFCO Investment, who presented his insights into the investment considerations of venture capitalists and the changing trends for investing into ICT companies over the last three years; and Mr Jeremy Cooper, Vice President of Marketing, Asia Pacific, salesforce.com, who spoke about how companies can successfully leverage cloud computing in their business.