Mr Chau Chee Chiang: IT is a people business. Our staff and our stakeholders are our most important consideration.

Just four months into his job as Chief Information Officer (CIO) of the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), Mr Chau Chee Chiang is nonetheless familiar with the roles, duties and responsibilities of a CIO, having served in that capacity at the Defence Science & Technology Agency (DSTA) from 2007 to 2009 before being appointed its Deputy Director for National Security.

In this interview with the e-Gov Bulletin, Mr Chau talks about his personal  IT journey and his balancing act as a
CIO – for example, between innovation and governance; and between transformation and operations – to maximise value for stakeholders.

What attracted you to IT as a career?
If you had told me during my junior college days that I would build my career in IT, I might have freaked out. Unlike many of my peers, I was IT-averse then, not even knowing where to locate the power switch of a computer. But when I was in Japan from 1989 to 1994, I started playing computer games – Romance of the Three Kingdoms and others – and after a while, I tried to manipulate the game data in order to change the game’s complexity and outcomes. My interest in computing grew out of that hobby.

After returning from my studies in Japan armed with an electrical engineering degree, I met up with the human resource people from the Ministry of Defence (MINDEF).  Among the available openings was a systems engineer position with the Systems and Computer Organisation and I thought, ‘why not?’.

Having served as CIO in different organisations, what do you think are some of the challenges that CIOs face
in general?
CIOs have to manage stakeholders and to bridge the gap between senior management and the IT function. They have to be able to make trade-offs between innovation and governance, including risk management and compliance. They must also decide how much effort and time to put into transformation – in pushing the boundaries – compared with operations, where the priority is to ensure smooth running without any downtime. With cloud computing, they have to manage services as well. Stakeholders now demand and expect more from their IT folks.

What are some of the challenges that are unique to IDA?
IDA has broad objectives. For example, on the one hand it reaches out to the elderly, the non-IT savvy, and equips them with the necessary Infocomm skills to communicate and enrich their lives. On the other hand, it serves as the CIO for the Government and establishes plans and policies. It is also a regulatory body for the telecommunication industry, as well as an industry developer enhancing the competitiveness of Singapore's IT industry. IDA therefore means different things to different people.

To adequately handle each of these broad requirements, our IT team must have a deep understanding of the needs of our various stakeholders as well as a broad knowledge of IDA’s business as a whole. We need to develop an architecture that will provide commonality in its business, and yet understand that the various departments are specialists in their different fields.

I feel humbled being the CIO of IDA because I know that many of my users and colleagues here  are IT experts in their own right, and perhaps much more knowledgeable and experienced than I am.

Our IT team handles the IT function of all of IDA’s corporate IT and systems and its line-of-business applications. We need to plan in advance to meet the business objectives of IDA in a timely manner; our IT portfolio has to  meet IDA’s current and future needs. As Government CIO, IDA is expected to be ahead of the curve within the public service in the use of IT. It has to showcase to other agencies and departments the latest IT applications that are creating buzz – business analytics, cloud computing, mobile computing and so forth – and show what they can deliver and how they can help the business. Only then can we convince others to do likewise.

What are some of the interesting projects that you have worked on in the course of your career?
One of my most interesting assignments was in 2005 when I managed a team of 40 engineers to manage the operations and support of MINDEF’s IT systems. For many, the job might seem mundane but for me it was a chance to learn people management.  One staff was in his 60s, and we had to overcome what seemed like a generation gap and to make him feel that he was indeed one of us.

During my stint there, I found that the priorities of those in their 20s and early 30s were different from those in their mid-30s to 40s, who often have to shoulder more family commitments. Those who were just starting out were generally eager to learn, always asking for feedback but they were also always slightly restless, wanting to ensure that they got ahead in their careers. I also learned that priorities changed as one’s life situation changes.  To make things more complex, even where people belonged to the same cohort, their priorities may not the same. Often, we had to accommodate the staff’s changing needs through job re-design, rotations and transfers.  We need to constantly pay attention to our staff’s needs and listen to them.

Is there any particular insight into the IT profession that you would like to share?
I strongly feel that IT is a people business. Our staff and our stakeholders are our most important consideration. We start with people and end with people. After that are the processes. Technology is only a distant third after people and processes.