Hong Kong’s new Government Chief Information Officer (GCIO), Howard Dickson, makes it quite clear that he is not only the right man for the job, he also has the background, experience and attitude necessary for the position. He has a commanding presence, obviously won’t tolerate nonsense, but has the ability to listen and not force his views on others.

In short, he should do well here - especially given his extensive background. Mr Dickson’s work has already taken him from an engineering course at university to the Canadian National Railway (CN), on to banking and business consulting, and - just before coming to Hong Kong - the Canadian military, where he was Group CIO. All these jobs were extremely demanding, and can labelled ‘mission critical’ but Mr Dickson always rose to the occasion, and in doing so established an impressive track record. Now he faces what may well be the toughest challenge of his distinguished career.

Tradelink Talk: Let’s look at your background first. What was CN like back in the early 1970s when you joined?

Howard Dickson: When I joined CN in 1971, the railway was a sink-hole for investments and was driven by what was called the ‘car cycle’ you loaded one car, shipped it, unloaded it and got it back to someplace where it can be loaded again. The loading part took care of itself [in terms of revenues]. The challenge was when the car was empty: you had an expensive asset that was not making money. The problem was that they [CN] didn’t know where the cars were. If you didn’t know where the cars were, you couldn’t make decisions about where you wanted them to be.

So we built a kind of mass-distribution supply chain application that tracked where the cars were. Once we could track them, it gave us huge savings - it was a simple unifying measure. This was much easier to control than encouraging the clerks to work harder or train drivers to be more accurate.

Tradelink Talk: What did you do after your railway experience?

Howard Dickson: From there, I went into in banking, where we put ATMs in the walls. This was a good example of every project being a failure, but the whole programme being a success. We probably did not begin to benefit from the ATMs until we asked: how are we planning to deliver banking services, and is this a channel in its own right?

Tradelink Talk: You then spent some time in the world of business consulting. What did you learn?

Howard Dickson: I spent a fascinating time at Ernst & Young. I spent four years there and didn’t bill one hour in the computing business - I was entirely involved in business process re-engineering. In consulting, you don’t make savings anywhere until you decide what work you are not going to do. It was interesting for me to see what things people thought were sacred and would not give up. It gave me a good for understanding about client psychology and enabled me to gain their support where it mattered. It also allowed me to find out upfront from people what was working and what was not.

Tradelink Talk: How different were the lessons you learnt when you joined the Canadian military?

Howard Dickson: I joined the Canadian military in 1998. There were 23 departmental CIOs and we needed to get them to work together. We had large ERP [enterprise resource planning] projects and we thought it would be far better to have one group supporting all of them. Getting people to agree for the corporate good was very interesting. I was there for six years and left with a very different view of the military.

Tradelink Talk: Do you think that your varied background will help you take on your new role in Hong Kong?

Howard Dickson: There are a couple of things I have observed since my arrival.

In Hong Kong, there seems to be a very large number of computer societies. As with all large groups of people, some will think you are too slow and others that you are going too fast - but all that is part of public life. Part of my role as GCIO is to provide support and guidance to the industry, and I find that it can be a daunting task.

When I was a private consultant, I found out that it was important to first find out who the clients were and what they wanted. We can debate for the rest of the year whether a certain standard is right or not, or whether we need more transparency and openness for competition and in our tendering. However, if we were to please all the vendors out there, we would be the first country to have done so. In any case, I’m not sure that pleasing vendors can - or should - be our prime objective. I do know that when a consultancy is busy, they have a focus: they know what they need to do, which courses to promote, the business areas that they need to become acquainted with and the people they need to recruit. That is true for us in the Government as well.

Tradelink Talk: What do you see as the primary goals of your job at this time?

Howard Dickson: How do we turn Hong Kong into a place that makes it even easier to gain access to mainland China? That is the tall pole in the tent to support the local community.

Part of the dialogue with the mainland is to ensure that we have all the right licences, certificates, etc. What does the largest community in the world need? Surely we are the best qualified in the world to answer that question.

I think I come to my job with a healthy dose of pragmatism. In Canada, an incredible proportion of our economic activity is done in conjunction with the United States, our biggest neighbour is to the south. In Hong Kong, the situation is similar, except the neighbour is to the north. When you start dancing with a bear you stop when the bear? tired.

Tradelink Talk: How do you view e-government and how important do you think it is to accomplishing your goals?

Howard Dickson: That is another side to my role. I don’t regard e-government as primarily a technology play. It’s really a play on the relationship between the citizen and government. We need to become citizen-centric, just as 15-20 years ago companies became customer-centric.

It’s one thing to sign up for the strategy, but it’s another to understand the details and specifics of what it really means. One of the discoveries I have made has been that the better the experience people have in doing business with their government, the more positively they will view that government. There is a business case to be made for encouraging transformation of the Government to become more citizen-centric, and maybe something more transparent.

I think stages one and two [of this transformation] have already been completed. Stage one was getting the strategy together; stage two was getting an electronic equivalent of existing services in play.

Tradelink Talk: So what do you think the next stage for e-government should be?

Howard Dickson: The next stage is to have departments and the services they provide organised to make them easier for citizens to use. That will involve re-engineering, senior sponsorship of those departments and change.

Change is stuff you can’t buy. You’ve been nurturing your department your entire career and now somebody in e-government is suggesting amalgamating certain services - clearly that is going to be questioned. It will definitely be challenged, and understanding the views of my colleagues is important.

We need to find a way of addressing those challenges so that they can be synchronised with the advancement of e-government. I hope I can become a valuable back-room person rather than somebody on the front page of the newspaper saying: ‘Here are the five things we shall do by next Tuesday.’

Tradelink Talk: Do these ideas influence and reflect your style of management?

Howard Dickson: I truly believe that someone coming along from the IT department and telling people what they are doing wrong is not the best way to proceed. We have to understand our colleagues and their challenges. If e-government doesn’t help people with their problems, then maybe it doesn’t make sense to them at all.

My job, in the first few months, is to understand. I must understand the challenges faced by my colleagues. We must find a way to gain their trust. To me it is a facilitator-negotiator-background support job. It is not a man in a white coat with all the silver bullets and solutions.

People have to want the change; you cannot go in and simply tell them what to do. You have to do those things to show you’re alive and have a pulse, and one of my concerns is that an extreme act [to introduce changes rapidly] can be just as unproductive as looking at a problem for a long time and making no decision.