Professor C.J. Tan is, among many things, a co-founder and director of the E-Business Technology Institute (ETI) of the University of Hong Kong, and Interim CEO of the Hong Kong R&D Centre for Logistics and Supply Chain Management Enabling Technologies (LSCM), which was recently set up by the Hong Kong government to facilitate the introduction of RFID into our local business practices. He is unusual in that he is equally comfortable and effective in both the world of academia and the world of business.

After 35 years doing research for IBM - where he "made things work in the real world" - he was approached by the University of Hong Kong in 1999 to help set up a programme to do "applications research", rather than basic research. Academics sometimes work on obscure projects with seemingly no real value, but in Professor Tan's case the opposite was true. His talents were considered right for leading the ETI because of his special ability to turn research work into positive, practical results.

The message from Deep Blue

Born in China to a father from Sichuan and a mother from Shanghai, Professor Tan left in 1949 for Taiwan and 10 years later went to America where he studied engineering, first in Seattle and later at Columbia University. He was involved in a number of projects but certainly one of the most high-profile was a special challenge he was offered as a result of his work in massive parallelism. "I was interested in massive parallelism and other very high-end computing problems when an opportunity arose to put into practice some of the research I had done. IBM asked me to manage the 'Deep Blue' project, which was an attempt to see if we could use our computer to beat then world chess champion, Garry Kasparov," he says.

Professor Tan plays "a little chess" but does not regard himself as an expert. He was far more interested in using IBM's massive computing power to try to solve a real-world problem (and one that would be highly visible for IBM, of course). It would be an extraordinary statement if a computer could beat the World Champion. In the early days, the computer was always beaten, but as the software became more sophisticated and the computers more powerful, the gap had narrowed. It took just one defeat before Deep Blue beat the Champion. Kasparov stormed out in disgust. Professor Tan believes that was a watershed in the history of computing and chess - though it was hardly "game over". Although a machine beat the human champion, it was human beings who had created the project and done the programing - and who really won the series. But the lessons learnt went far beyond chess.

"I think when we first started, we thought about looking ahead for each move, but it takes humans to create the programme. There will be weak spots, bugs, other problems. You are only as strong as your weakest link. In the real world, it is the same. You must adapt and change as technology and business practices change."

In the real world

This theme of "adapting and changing" was foremost in his mind. From large enterprises to SMEs, from the world of academic research and business to the deployment of RFID technology, adaptation is what marks success. It is also very difficult to achieve. Professor Tan should know: he spent 35 years at IBM, a company that has gone from one extreme to another - including nearly losing it all about 15 years ago.

He came to Hong Kong after the Vice Chancellor of the University of Hong Kong asked IBM to make him available to set up the institute here.

"At that time," he recollects, it was 1999 and the dotcom days. "Most of the University's research was in basics, not applied research." Basic research looks for interesting scientific anomalies to study, but is completely unconcerned with any practical value it may have. Applied research is the exact opposite of that: its main goal is to look at things and develop solutions that can be used in our world.

"I think if you give people a lot of freedom they will discover new things in science and that is great. It is always much more interesting to make new discoveries. But if you are aware of what you do, you must work within the confines of the world we live in. There is no time to fool around finding the one perfect solution: sometimes just getting something to work - even if it has some faults - is more important than perfection," he says.

"If you delay by one month, one week, you may miss an opportunity. It is about relevance: what is needed by the end user? We try to balance things. It is not about writing papers."

Market awareness

It can be more difficult, Professor Tan believes, to make something work in the real world than it can be to discover something new. "I think to build something that you can use and sell is much more difficult than discovering something new. When you want to build something really useful, you must look at the total and get it right - not perfect, but at least useful.

"Many of us are familiar with the tactics of companies like Microsoft who are extremely good at getting something onto the market and selling it, even if it is not 'perfect'. At least with a product that people can buy, you have a chance to grab market share. If you sit in your lab day after day seeking perfection, you may never produce anything," he said.

"At IBM we made a lot of mistakes over the years, but we really learnt a lot, too. You simply cannot ignore marketing and sales in this world."

The ETI in action

One of his first projects here in 1999 was wireless security. "Before RFID became a focus item for us, we concentrated on wireless security for mobile devices. This was from 1999 to 2004. We helped the transportation people in Hong Kong to analyse their data."

Analysing the vast amount of data generated by studies on traffic was something that interested him greatly because it got back to data mining, a subject he has specialised in. This is also very useful for the work he does in RFID and Logistics, because both of these areas generate enormous amounts of data, and "data mining" is nothing but a process that enables us to make sense of all that data.

The combination of RFID and Logistics is very exciting, he believes. There is still much to be done and he expects those areas to remain the main areas of research at ETI for at least the next few years.

"We shall continue to do RFID and logistics for a while. It is not just about RFID, there are many other issues such as business-to-business relations and exchange of data. If you look at the logistics industry, it is possible for us to move to areas such as collaboration, more sophisticated analysis, payment structures, and a lot of other exciting things. There is a lot to do.

"To do all of this in Hong Kong is an excellent opportunity. This is after all the meeting place for China and the rest of the world.

Hong Kong's opportunity

"I think Hong Kong is in a very good position. We have lots of exchanges with the US and with universities throughout the world. We have many visitors from China as well. We have deals with Jiaotong University, Fudan University and others. There is a tremendous amount of interchange. People come here from China, for example, for three months at a time."

Professor Tan was not about to criticise the Hong Kong Government over various e-commerce implementations, but if they have not succeeded, it could be because of the high standard of service expected here, he said.

"I guess e-commerce in Hong Kong depends a lot on service. Hong Kong people are accustomed to good service and if you do not have a good CRM system to back it up, it may not work well. The customer has to be satisfied with the service. Perhaps when the systems become more sophisticated, things may get better," he says.

Hong Kong has always been driven by the practical, rather leading-edge creative thinking. People like Professor Tan may help change that.