Q&A: Huawei's Hong-Eng Koh on the value of digital transformation

Hong-Eng Koh’s extensive experience working with public sector agencies globally for the past three decades has left him best placed to develop Huawei’s public sector digital transformation and smart city strategy for its Enterprise Business Group. After starting his career at the Singapore Police, he moved on to a major role in the country’s early national e-Government programme. This led him to Sun Microsystems which was acquired by Oracle, where he spent a total of 16 years in a variety of leadership roles in the global public sector business before he joined Huawei.

At the centre of his career has been an enthusiasm for the opportunities digital transformation can offer, whether it’s a collaborative e-government tailor-made for the sharing economy, socially enabled policing and collaborative public safety. He is also an artificial intelligence evangelist and created the 7A framework in identifying how the technology can accelerate government digital transformation.

SmartCitiesWorld sat down with Hong-Eng to discuss why digitalisation is so critical for cities to thrive in the decades ahead.

SmartCitiesWorld: What opportunities does smart technology offer cities?

Hong-Eng: If we look at how smart technologies complement development of cities, we can nail it down to six broad areas:

• Intelligent Connectivity: You simply cannot realise digitalisation without connectivity. As witnessed during the pandemic, people and machines are connected through broad bandwidth to work anytime anywhere. Increasingly, constituents expect city services to be 24/7, preferably contactless and available online. But the machines and sensors enabling these services need to have high quality connectivity, especially mission-critical services. Cities need to invest in city-wide connectivity, especially wireless technology such as 5G, and intelligent technologies which improve user experience and energy efficiency, optimise resource utilisation and enhance O&M efficiency, such as Huawei’s Autonomous Driving Network (ADN), which has it all
• Ubiquitous Computing: Because of its background role, the importance of computing is often understated. Digitalisation and AI are all about data, and data crunching. Computing power has to catch up with the ever-increasing astronomical amount of data we have to deal with. Intelligent traffic management, autonomous vehicles, telemedicine, smart education, etc. all require strong computing power, which has to be present everywhere and ubiquitous. The pandemic is driving almost all things online and the traditional way of building data centres is a challenge. This is where Huawei’s Smart Modular Data Centre comes in handy, especially with efficient power management
• Inclusive AI: AI has to be inclusive and everywhere for everyone and everything given the volume of disparate use cases it supports. These can range from analysing a CT scan, assessing a tax submission for fraud, determining whether a railway track needs repair, giving dynamic information to first responders, to enabling driverless public transport
  Huawei offers a full-stack and all-scenario AI platform to support the myriad use cases. The platform features its Ascend AI processors, the MindSpore framework with independent machine learning libraries, and the ModelArts pre-integrated end-to-end services for application enablement
• Universal Cloud: In the fight against Covid-19 and with ICT business continuity management challenges, the importance of Universal Cloud becomes even more obvious. In the last few months, many healthcare providers around the world took advantage of an AI assisted CT scan analysis readily available on Huawei Cloud to identify Covid patients. The previous manual method took 14 minutes per patient, and it is now reduced to 2.5 minutes with AI on cloud. However, cities have to maintain digital sovereignty, ownership and control, by having the infrastructure and data within their jurisdiction. Data crossing borders is not avoidable; we need close monitoring and management of such flows. We need in place all the necessary privacy measures and to gain the trust from all stakeholders. Last but not least, local skills and capabilities to build, operate and maintain sovereign cloud
• Industry Digital Transformation: This is where we integrate all these technologies to develop the various smart city solutions, such as smart healthcare, digital tax, converged city operations, smart education, and smart municipal services
• Smart Devices: Digitalisation means we have to literally bring the services and data to the fingertips of the constituents and city officials, and at an affordable cost. Otherwise, the digital divide will become a major issue and could divide societies further. In addition to smart devices for the people, we are also seeing more devices collecting and sensing data, such as air quality monitoring sensor and flood sensor.

SmartCitiesWorld: By enabling digitisation, what kinds of new services will cities be able to offer citizens?

Hong-Eng: This pandemic is providing many reasons and even the urgency for the digital transformation of some of these services. Let me give you some examples. A citizen usually has to interact with several different public sector bodies in order to complete a certain task. To drive a car, I have to learn how to drive, pass the highway code and driving test, buy a car, register it, pay the road tax and maintain the vehicle. Quite often that may mean visiting agencies separately, whether onsite or online. We need to reduce such multiple contacts, especially those involving physical transactions. There is an urgent need to move away from the agency-centric to the user-centric model.

To do so we need two things. Firstly, a public sector-wide enabling platform, which will connect up the different systems and databases across the different public sector agencies and provide a true one-stop service to the user. One example is the Saudi Government Service Bus. Secondly, a public sector app store just like those on our mobile devices. Different agencies may require similar applications, so why not build a store for the sharing of apps? We can invite businesses and even individuals to build such apps. India has a plan for such e-Government Apps Store.

There is an urgent need to move away from the agency-centric to the user-centric model.

Many transactions with the public sector are mandated by regulations. It means many of these processes can be automated using AI. An added benefit is consistency in delivering services to people and businesses and the ability to help overcome the digital divide. In any society there will still be people with limited access to digital services. There is a need for one-stop service centres for them to go to for physical transactions. These centres can also be educational centres to promote the use of technology.

At least at the city level, it is critical for business continuity management and monitoring of essential supplies, services and personnel. Top decision makers need to make cross-agency decisions based on such data. With companies going bankrupt and increasing unemployment, the grassroots economy becomes even more important. Individuals and small businesses must be encouraged to produce more goods and services. The public sector has a role to play by digitally enabling such small businesses and protecting them amid a tough economy.

Be it big enterprises or small businesses, and even public sector transactions, we do need a cashless society, probably with multiple online payment providers. Another critical component of digital transformation is a non-fragmented and standard electronic identity. While it may be managed commercially, the public sector has to be the driver behind such a national electronic ID for people, enterprises and agencies to trust and transact with one another. Blockchain technology seems promising in this area.

SmartCitiesWorld: How will they be able to transform their own operations?

Hong-Eng: This pandemic is the catalyst for the public sector to evolve and even transform. Let’s start by looking at governance and internal operations. The top priority must be looking after the safety and wellbeing of public servants, with many of them performing essential services. This may involve redesigning the workplace, including the use of technology to detect threats.

The public sector too has to allow decentralisation of the workforce and enable them to work from anywhere. Do we really need a huge centre in the middle of a city staffed by hundreds of employees, especially with today’s broadband connectivity and 5G? For example, during the height of the pandemic, some UK emergency call centres allowed their call takers to work from home. Earlier this year Fujitsu also announced that by 2022 it will reduce office space by 50 per cent since more staff are working from home.

The public sector has strict governance and process in adopting innovation. But this is a period of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. We need to support more agile public-private joint-innovation to overcome this pandemic and economic downturn. Beyond video-conferencing, the public sector can adopt more technologies brought about by 5G, cloud and AI to improve collaboration, such as AR, VR, immersive reality, full multimedia user interface, and even robotics. Automation too can increase efficiency and reduce physical contacts.