A lot has been written about the digital evolution and how this may save our bacon in the near future in the aftermath of the global financial meltdown, particularly due to bank failures. Today’s world has become accustomed to instant access on demand and interaction based on each individual’s terms.
We are moving away from products sold in the traditional packaged-goods manner to instant digital delivery. Our consumption of media has been completely transformed, if not revolutionised. Our digital evolution may have commenced with music but we have travelled a long way since then and have progressed to consuming all forms of media digitally: music, television, movies, maps, photographs, Google earth and, of course, emails and SMS. The era of physical access to media is fading into history due to our desire to access all our media on demand, in any form and at any time. As consumers, we want the media of our choice when we want it and where we want it.
We are also undergoing another incredible transformation: we are moving away from the concept of the ‘personal computer’ to an era of ‘cloud computing’. We expect to be able to access information immediately, at our fingertips, on any device that has a screen and assume it is connected to a fast and instant Internet. We are stepping away from our desk-top computers more and more and using everything from smart phones to net books and tablets for our computing, information, and entertainment needs. Still, we all feel gratified about the new trend of technology that pushes what is aphoristically termed “cloud operations”. The wonders of cloud interoperability can drive business transformation and innovation .At PKF we believe the interoperability benefits of this technology will help accelerate business competitiveness and are proud to announce the launch of a state-of-the art portal termed Tune …Malta (enter www.tunemalta.com). Here preferred partners across the globe talk to each other in a way not dissimilar to how friends surf Facebook to their desires and lifestyles. The ability of providers of mobile digital services surfing Tune Portal helps to optimise the value chain through various possibilities of open-ended partnerships atoning the virtues of cloud technology on a gilded altar. Implementation of e-business is facilitated by Tune Malta as it helps to accelerate business integration through cloud connectivity.
E-business is vital to diluting our island’s isolationist mentality. In theory, it can be instrumental to boosting business in the Single EU market – not only in buying and selling but also in providing services (B to B) and collaborating with business partners. Yes, we’ve heard before that the Internet has transformed the world forever and this now sounds like a worn out cliché. But the digital revolution promises a future of boundless opportunity accessed at the speed of light, of a globally wired world, of unlimited entertainment and education within everyone’s reach. We have just started our ride and there is more joy to come.
Even in our miniscule economy, people have benefited immensely from the partial digitalisation of government services. There are some miserable exceptions to the rule: for instance the suffering people waiting in long queues to be served at ARMS (the state-of-the-art, IBM -powered state agency responsible for generating water and electricity bills) yet where various ministries are concerned, people can now relax knowing that, from the comfort of their homes, certain forms can be downloaded or applications submitted electronically. More needs to be done to inculcate a sense of conformity among ministries, but progress in certain sectors fully justifies the massive investment in software and hardware. It’s no wonder that the younger generation fully appreciates how the ripples of the prolific Internet continue to have a tsunami-like effect on all aspects of their life and have indeed transformed the very nature by which society interacts. The Internet ‘cloud’ has evolved from the “Internet” we knew in the early 1980s to recent advances in its core. Unquestionably, it is an integral part of the global infrastructure.
Even in a small island such as ours, government has preferred to place more resources to its cause than perhaps were invested in improving the infrastructure of the arterial roads that make modern-day transportation possible and safe. This policy means that residents of Tal Wej in Mosta will continue to suffer in silence.
They ignore the multiplication of potholes in residential roads in Mosta (partly due to a dysfunctional council) which mars the quality of their lives. Still no protests or manifestations in the streets as home owners altruistically appreciate party apologists reminding them of state investment in internet connectivity which has improved the social medium. In many ways the Internet has become the backbone of human interaction. The digital reality is something factual and very much tangible.
We pride ourselves that we enjoy one of the highest Internet penetration rates in our homes. As a result, the worldwide web touches the rather limited subset of human experience spent sitting alone staring at a screen. The way we browse the web, clicking with a mouse or touching an iPad screen, is similar to a child sitting in a shopping trolley in a supermarket – pointing at things of interest, and constantly trying to reach treats that are just out of reach. The latest ‘android’ smartphones, giving us massive power at our fingertips, can be compared to children at play. It is a compelling metaphor for interacting with information. Users of smartphones are downloading thousands of free applications (including eBooks), using all their senses to explore and create, in groups as well as alone. Anyone who has bought a smartphone this Christmas has felt the joy and power within reach. Paradoxically, the march of technical progress threatens to end the simple pleasure of reading a nicely bound book, or writing with a fountain pen, or driving to a cinema …all this descends into an anachronism in almost an act of defiance.
In order to keep up, your book or movie should be ready to flick through on an iPad or a Galaxy pad or other tablet models. Certainly your writing should be done on a crystal clear tablet. But the reality is that purists tell us that books or fountain pens really do perform their intended jobs better than their digital descendants. We stare in awe at how, in a couple of decades, this revolution has taken over our lives. Technical gurus bore us by saying that complex digital data of all kinds, whether an email message or a movie, is encoded as a simple string of 0′s and 1′s. All this innovation can be attributed to a remarkable discovery by Claude Shannon and John von Neumann in the 1940s. Before them, it was obvious that engineered systems degraded with time and use.
Errors still occur in digital systems, but instead of continuously degrading the performance there is a threshold below which errors can be corrected with near certainty. This means that you can send a message to the next room or to the next continent and be confident that it will arrive faithful to the form in which you sent it. This does not mean we should discredit our computers; it means we should be careful not to be so over-dependent on their performance. Technology can be a good servant but a bad master. Still here we notice that almost all families possess one or two computer towers and that this equipment is fully exploited by children. Inexpensive computers are continuously flooding the market and yet to some the digital divide makes it much more difficult to understand how to operate them, thus segregating our society into an information-rich upper class and an information-poor underclass. In this regard, how can we not mention the positive news that will further consolidate our digital heritage? I refer to the recent announcement that Cisco will be setting up its local operations at SmartCity Malta. Undoubtedly this adds another golden ring to our chain of digital successes. Cisco introduces its Borderless Network Architecture to create a robust, secure and flexible networking environment, to complement the construction of a vast ICT business city in the south of the island. With an investment outlay equivalent to $300 million, SmartCity Malta promises to transform Malta into a state-of-the-art ICT and media business community.
To conclude, I hope that, with the help of the SmartCity set-up, the island can continue to tap into the digital evolution and generate sustainable ICT jobs for years to come.
George Mangion is a partner in PKFMALTA, an audit and business advisory firm.
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