Apply for a work permit or residency visa in Hong Kong in the near future, and your application will be processed using artificial intelligence rather than a human being. It's all thanks to the continuing high-tech wave that is sweeping through Hong Kong, particularly with regard to e-government.
The Immigration Department may not seem to be the most logical focal point for e-government, but Hong Kong depends on immigration and on bringing in the best and brightest brains in order to maintain its economy. Hence Immigration has taken on the role most of us associate with Home Affairs or Interior.
Wong shared his "double S" approach to development: strategic and systematic. By strategic, every project had to be linked to a business outcome, rather than be technology for technology's sake.
"We aren't doing e-Passports just to be the first in the region, we need to be very clear where to go. Hong Kong needs to fight for visitors from China, Europe and the US and we are working on how we facilitate the arrival of visitors," he said.
The current wave of e-government started in 1990, when Immigration initiated a government-wide information systems review.
Up until then, each department had been building up its own proprietary systems and silos, which could not interoperate with each other. For instance, even the name field varied between 35 and 40 characters in length in different databases.
Meanwhile, the number of visitors to Hong Kong continued to grow from 4.8 million in 1965 to 9.3 million in 1985, 41 million in 1995 and 192 million in 2005.
Wong said that many felt that Immigration may soon have to have 100,000 officers and a huge new airport just to house the queues. Obviously that was not an option.
The number of immigration personnel grew proportionally from 600 to 4,700 in the two decades from 1965 to 1985, but they have roughly levelled out since then despite the number of visitors still rising.
Chek Lap Kok airport handles an average of 50,000 passengers a day, with over 100,000 on a busy day. Today, thanks to the smart ID card system, one immigration officer supervises five automated immigration gates, and not necessarily in person. A wireless network at the airport and immigration checkpoints means that they can supervise the immigration checkpoints from a nearby coffee shop.
Page scanning has helped the capture of information at traditional passport control counters too. Ten years ago, it took an average of two minutes to capture and process the information in a passport. Today it is down to 50 seconds.
So successful was Immigration's drive to automate processes that the department led Hong Kong's second Information Systems Strategic Plan to face the challenges of the new millennium in 1999.
The plan, finalised in 2000, set out a master plan for 30 IT megaprojects in five strategic areas leading up to 2010. This included the smart ID card project, which was started in 2001 and was first issued to the Immigration department's customers in 2003.
In 2004, it rolled out automated vehicle clearance for cars and trucks arriving and leaving the territory. And by the end of 2006, Wong's team will have rolled out APPLIES - the Application and Investigation System.
All applications for visas and work permits will be filed digitally, with the processing done by an "e-brain" that uses both artificial intelligence and case-based learning, just like a human brain.
Initially, difficult cases will be handled by an officer, but the computer will learn and the next time the case could be approved automatically.
Wong had just returned from London and Brussels on a mission to test e-passports for interoperability.
"We will be one and half years behind Thailand when we introduce our e-Passport in early 2007, however, since a passport is for international travel, an e-passport would be useless if it cannot be used overseas," he said.
He explained that e-passport specifications had settled down and were quite well defined by the ICAO. The requirements for biometrics and the image are standardised, as is the need for 32KB of EEPROM memory. The specification goes into detail of how the photograph is to be used for face recognition purposes and even go down to the mid-level framework and data structures on a chip.
The Hong Kong e-passport will be able to be used electronically in Europe. However, Wong was still working with the US authorities and looked forward to one day working with Thailand for automated access as it is a major destination for Hong Kong holidaymakers.
Also very non-bureaucratic and business-like is Hong Kong Immigration's attitude to outsourcing.
While most of Immigration's development work is outsourced, internal teams remain responsible for project management and work closely with the partner, while they develop their own high-security, confidential sub-systems in-house.
For instance, the Hong Kong smart ID card took years to study, and in particular focussed on how multiple applications would be handled to understand and address the needs. Only then did Immigration go to the legislative council (Hong Kong's parliament) to ask for funding for the project.
Wong said that while some ID projects, like in Malaysia, had been outsourced to five different companies, it meant the Malaysian government ended up with a big problem in integrating the five modules.
Hong Kong, on the other hand, outsources the entire project - be it smart ID card, e-gate, or e-brain - to a primary contractor but works closely with that primary contractor in working groups and committees.
"If you break it down too finely, there will be grey areas which don't seem to be anybody's responsibility," he said, before nodding knowingly when asked on Thailand's own smart ID card cocktail, which had many ministries and contractors micro-managing the project.
Hong Kong's smart ID card was done by PWC Consulting, the control point system by IBM, the e-channel by EDS while the new e-brain system had just been awarded to Singapore's NCS.
Wong explained how a successful outsourcing relationship was like going out to dinner. The customer decides what they would like to eat - Chinese or French, duck or chicken - but does not go into the kitchen to tell the cook how to cook the food.
Later, Wong showed off the Immigration Department's operations centre, which had an impressive data wall with schematics of all 10 entry and exit points to Hong Kong and the status of each terminal - who was logged in where, how many seconds they were spending on each transaction as well as the customary server and network load indicators.
One screen even had digital CCTV footage of all the power plant and sub-stations that fed each immigration checkpoint to prevent them being sabotaged.
As the tour progressed, one screen had a series of critical warnings pop up. One of the staff explained that a network failure had occurred in one checkpoint, but that the redundant backup had kicked in with no interruption in work and that the ISP was working on bringing up the main connection.
Personal data for visitors and citizens using the checkpoint is obscured, but otherwise the IT staff have full control and visibility over everything that is happening and up to the minute figures on queue length and of how many people are in Hong Kong and on what type of visa.
They also have access to the source-code and can go in and fix urgent bugs that may be bringing the system down, though thankfully that has not been needed up until now.
Throughout the interview, Wong never used the word "government," but always talked of the business needs and business objectives of Hong Kong, with citizens referred to as customers.
The entire department was a paragon of high-tech, with retinal scanners on doors and even the walls, which at first seemed to be made of opaque glass, were electronic and could turn transparent to give a clear view of the operations centre.
Asked for his secret in success, Wong put it down to love and passion for his job, empathy for his customers, assertion with his outsourcing partners and dedication.
Autor(en)/Author(s): Don Sambandaraska
Quelle/Source: Bangkok Post, 13.12.2006
