i-Witness

Technology is meant to improve life, not to aggravate it

May 16, 2006

How did you file your income tax returns this year, by manual submission or e-Filing? Let me tell you this, I tried e-Filing. I gave up, and returned to paper submission.

Despite the hype, the Inland Revenue Board just isn’t ready with the electronic tax returns processes. My benchmark is the electronic visa application process employed by the US Embassy in Kuala Lumpur, which has a similar methodology. You need Internet connection, filling of electronic forms and final output in PDF. It’s done in a jiffy, as all information submitted electronically will be verified with the government’s backend databases. In contrast, our IRB is half-baked with their processes, with loopholes in between.

I was to eager to register for e-Filing, but was asked to visit an IRB branch office to collect a Personal Identification Number (PIN), a process that required me to physically produce my MyKad for verification. The officer would then key-in my IC number onto their terminal to call up my Income Tax account number. Once they tally, a pre-printed PIN, issued in collaboration with certification authority (CA) Trustgate, was given to me. That is after the officer had written down the serial number of the PIN onto a logbook typified with hand-drawn columns for names, IC number, Income tax number and PIN serial number. I then had to acknowledge receipt by putting down my physical signature in the logbook. I swear that this hybrid of manual record plus computer-aided processes will soon create gawks and gaps in data integrity. However, to be fair, I was later notified that manual PIN collection was replaced with an online process. So an early bird, like me, did deserve a reward. Guinea pig.

Try the e-Filing proper, and problems, errors and doubts surfaced to defeat you.

First, it was “Pendaftaran Sijil Digital Anda Tidak Berjaya”. Then, it was “Pemegang No. K/P pengenalan ini belum cukup umur 18 tahun”. I tried and tried, and somehow got over it. Then came that last stinger when I finally got to the part on deductions for children. The column was there but the field was blocked out and I couldn’t put in my daughter’s particulars. Was IRB trying to deny me my rebates?

It’s déjà vu. Technology is supposed to make life easy, not to complicate and aggravate it. In the case of IRB, how do you justify spending millions on technology upgrades only to find it complicating and useless? How could they bring out the bride when the make-up isn’t ready?

Meanwhile, our contemporaries who have approached IT in business processes have zoomed past us. Let me share some experiences in air travels, the service sector that demands mission-critical IT infrastructure and customer satisfaction benchmarking.

I have, in recent years, changed to Singapore Airlines and, at times, have to transit via Changi Airport. One reason is to reward myself with a better passenger handling experience, and the other is to observe how our competitors are upgrading their business processes to stay globally competent. Basically, my only sacrifice is to endure hours lost through transit and connecting flights.

Singapore Airlines has an innovative use of emails and SMS, two killer applications than our generation can no longer live without. By maintaining an active account with KrisFlyer, you not only earn air-mile rewards with SIA and the StarAlliance consortium, you can now check-in for your outgoing and return flights, and determine your preferred seats -- online – four days ahead of take-off.

You can have an option of having the confirmation delivered to you via email, or SMS to your registered mobilephone, wherever you are in the world. With that done, even an economy class traveller could beat the long queue at busy airports to check-in and obtain your boarding pass at the speed normally reserved for business and first class passengers. That’s because SIA has a special check-in counter for Internet Check-in, worldwide, to issue the boarding pass.

I tested that several times, even holding an e-Ticket that’s no more than a piece of printout. The SIA boarding pass that I collected, which carried my KrisFlyer number, enabled me to enjoy at least 15% rebates at airport lounges, F&B outlets and merchandise outlets in Changi, Manila and selected Australian cities.

The other awe I had was that my airmiles were updated on my KrisFlyer account barely eight hours I have competed a flight. I did no extra steps to make this happen as SIA has auto-captured my flight details at the point of boarding. Because of that, even my retrospective airmile claims could be confirmed within two hours, though I received an email, and later a snail, from its Head of Loyalty Programme who humbly stated that the missing airmiles would take four weeks to reconcile.

When Malaysia makes e-Filing and e-Flying a seamless user experience, we will surely see each other at the top.

Posted by Jeff Ooi at 07:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Broadband penetration, local content, and liberalising telco industry

May 1, 2006

Before becoming the Minister of Energy, Water and Communication in 2004, Datuk Seri Dr Lim Keng Yaik manned fort as the Minister for Primary Industries. His tenure took him through the rigorous period of massive development during the late 1980’s and the doldrums of the Asian Financial Crisis. It was his mettle in the palm oil industry that has unquestionably helped ascertain Malaysia’s continued foreign exchange income during those stormy years of the late 1990s. Despite the extended economic gloom, palm oil outshined other commodities in export revenue and provided the country much shelter in managing its fiscal shortfall that seriously impacted the neighbouring countries.

However, sitting in his new ministry where water, energy and communications industries are housed in one, his responsibility tripled. Leaving energy and water industries aside, to what extent is he going to leave behind a legacy that equalled his days spent in primary industries?

Currently, he has a plateful of unresolved issues. Fast-track broadband penetration; propelling the development of content to make broadband pervasiveness relevant; mobile-number portability; faster broadband speeds, operators’ lukewarm response to the registration of prepaid cellular service users. All are in a deadlock. How are to further liberalise the telecommunications industry when the telcos continued to resist the country’s public policies?

INDUSTRY RESISTANCE. Over the last two years, we have noticed that Keng Yaik did not make much headway in liberalising the telco industry, and the Minister himself has openly voiced his displeasure several times in the mass media.

Are the individual licensees in the teleco industries -- notably TM, Maxis and DiGi – classified under the ‘Little Napoleans’ who disrupt Malaysia’s forward charge that the PM lamented about?

Lately, we heard of Keng Yaik hinting that the government may force the country's three mobile players to step up domestic roaming and improve their services.

This is still a nagging pain in the form of quality of service (QoS) despite the fact that Malaysia has moved into mobile telephony for over 10 years. Under domestic roaming, when a network's cellular coverage is not available, a distressed mobile user is diverted to the network of a rival telco that can provide the coverage. But this hadn’t happened since Keng Yaik brought it up almost two years ago.

And so the minister said he saw resistance from the firms in getting them to voluntarily launch domestic roaming service across the country. He promised that if the government would introduce laws making it mandatory for them to do so.

Besides, we have also heard of Keng Yaik’s rationale for denying DiGi a 3G license and spectrum. He was quoted in the media as saying that the move was intended to break a monopoly of content among the three mobile phone operators.

It warrants highlighting that there are larger issues looming out there when the Minister outcried that telcos have become monopolistic, and that their behaviour of profit maximisation is hindering the development of the nation’s information and communications technology (ICT) industry.

The Minister has admitted Malaysia’s ICT industry, which is worth RM25 billion, is obviously lagging far behind that of South Korea’s which is pegged at RM570 billion.

He blamed the short-sighted players who apparently fail to realise that if the country’s ICT industry can be properly developed, it would contribute significantly to the Gross National Product. That’s common sense but ample food for thought.

LOCAL CONTENT. Coming back to Keng Yaik Lim’s rationale of the government’s latest awarding of 3G licenses, he remarked that the main barrier to 3G adoption in Malaysia is the lack of local content. He mentioned explicitly that when the government awarded the licences the first time, to Maxis and Celcom, the government wanted to spur the growth of content creation for 3G and also that of the mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) industry. Dead end.

What actually happened is that local content developers are getting a very raw deal because, under the Content Provider Platform (CPA) for SMS/WAP-based content, the cellular service providers usually take 60% of the profit for content services, leaving the content creators with only 40%. In contrast, DiGi retains 30% of the proceeds from the profit-sharing model with the balance 70% going to the content providers.

In Japan’s NTT DoCoMo, content developers are rewarded with 85 to 90% of the profit, depending on the popularity of the content genres.

I remember the Minister said: “The time has come in order to develop the industry, we have to regulate and open up the industry and stop the monopoly that causes bottlenecks. It's time for action.”

But how are we to move forward when the local content providers are given just bread-scrump?

Posted by Jeff Ooi at 07:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)