Industry calls for gov’t to take leading role in building ‘smart city’

Ms Ebel Cham, CTM, speaking at the seminar

A “smart city” has never seemed closer, with more and more livelihood services being brought onto the digital platform. While the technical conditions have gradually matured, related sectors suggest that the idea of Macau being built into a “smart city” still largely depends on the government taking a leading role and a sufficient IT workforce.
“The most crucial factor is the Macau government’s attitude and promotion; only with which can a smart city be made into reality,” stated Ms Ebel Cham, local telecom operator CTM’s vice president of Commercial, in a seminar held yesterday.
“When the government has a policy to push for it, we won’t need to wait any longer to build the networks,” she said, adding that enhancing the backbone network of telecommunications infrastructure is another key factor in building a “smart Macau.”
“But no matter how perfect the network is, it still requires an enormous amount of human resources to maintain the entire operation and construction,” she stressed, “Macau is sorely lacking information technology talent, which has been blocking the city from becoming a smart city.”
A lack of unified planning has also been hindering Macau’s integration process. A speaker from the smart card system operator Macau Pass S. A.,
Ms Stella Lei, indicated that such issues have caused repeated constructions, where the standards adopted by different departments and the networks they build are not compatible with each other.
Moreover, different departments and sectors are fenced off by a communication barrier, with their data storage isolated from one other. As a result, information cannot be shared or exchanged instantly, while interdepartmental coordination is hard to achieve.
“To develop a smart city you really need the government to take the lead; it needs a comprehensive long-term development strategy that includes urban planning, integration of public services, and the safety of urban living,” suggested Ms Lei.
“It not only depends on the application of the new generation of information technology like Cloud Computing and the Internet of Things, but more importantly the push for innovation through a knowledge-based society,” she added.
Besides e-payment, e-transportation, e-medical and e-governance, Macau also has huge potential in bringing tourist services onto the digital platform.
Among others, Ms Cham suggested that electronic-education is one of the first things to develop, “because of the huge demand in IT talents.”
“The Macau government has put a lot of recourses into education but hasn’t made a prioritized arrangement on cultivating IT talents in its strategy,” she said. “We hope to push society to move faster towards a smart city by contributing to e-education.”