IBM to Collaborate with Leading Singapore Institutions

IBM has announced a research collaboratory in Singapore, where researches from IBM will collaborate with Singapore local institutions to improve urban services. This is one of the project which will come under IBM Smarter Planet strategy.

From the news,

IBM will work with several agencies including the Economic Development Board (EDB) and the Land Transport Authority (LTA) to develop decision support tools to help Singapore more effectively manage its resources. As part of these efforts, IBM also intends to drive research collaborations with an ecosystem of research institutes and universities in Singapore.  

The collaboratory will enable world-class researchers in Singapore and IBM's mathematical experts, renowned for applying advanced analytics to solve real-world issues, to share skills, assets, and resources to achieve common research goals.

Singapore is one of the most advanced cities with extremely high demands placed on its urban infrastructure (water, transport and energy) due to its geography, size, population and dependence on neighbors for natural resources such as water and power. The country has also been at the forefront on the global stage in rallying for liveable and sustainable cities for the future. Besides promoting a learning network through the hosting of the biennial World Cities Summit, Singapore also aims to serve as a living lab for companies to test-bed innovative solutions for densely populated, compact urban environments. The research collaboratory for smarter cities will advance this endeavor.

The Group director of LTA Singapore Dr Chin Kian-Keong stated

"For LTA, the use of technology has always been at the forefront of what we do - how do we squeeze out more efficiency out of our transport system, and at the same time making it safe." 

Dr Chin said the research could provide intelligent solutions to real-life transport problems. "If you can get information of any traffic congestion to motorists way before they reach this incident side, and get them to detour, that will help to relieve the congestion that can be caused," added Dr Chin. 

While Singapore already has mechanisms to control traffic and the traffic alerts in place, I believe this initiative would push it even further and could well end up with personalized commuting. Here is a little video to illustrate some of the upcoming innovations from IBM where personalized commuting is a part of it. Come to think of it, I see Singapore is already laying foundations for personalized commuting.

Beware of Starhub Digital Voice Line Bills

Recently, Starhub has been upgrading their IT systems and so the customers have not been receiving monthly bills in their usual billing cycle. I for one had not received my bills for few months ( but as i am making my payments by GIRO) every month the amount has been automatically deducted. And recently i have received bills for the month of December and i noticed that there are some charges towards the Digital Voice Home line which is around S$10 (originally it was free). Even though it's not a big amount for anyone in SG, i just wanted to clarify and called Starhub. 

Nowadays, the line seems to be very busy and finally got connected to a customer consultant about 30 mins later ( thanks to the speaker phone facility, if not you got to hold the phone all the time). To my surprise the consultant told me that " The Digital Voice Home" is still free and Starhub has not introduced any charges till now. By diagnosing further, he told me that my Digital Voice line is registered under my old address where i lived many years back and was then using Starhub also. 

So what could have happened is during the IT systems upgrade there are some details which are messed up and showed up as charges in customer's bill.  And you know what, this has been happened for the last 3 months and since i have not been receiving any bills, i didn't had a chance to realise the amount. So eventually it turns out to be around S$30 which is a decent amount anyway..

Ok, the point here is Singaporeans are very busy in day to day life and don't have a chance to notice some of discrepancy in the utility bills.  But these things could happen, so please be aware. 

Had i not noticed, i would have missed around S$30 which could well be used for a family dinner in Food Court :) Say what ?

SOEasy is NOT SO Easy

Singapore government's plan to standardize the desktop and network components is underway and we all know the analyst firm Gartner has some doubts on the feasibility of achieving the kind of savings that government is trying to achieve (SGD 500 million).
Part of this initiative is also the migration of Lotus Notes to MS Exchange platform. I am very keen in exploring this area to see what would such initiatives finally bring to the table.
If this portion of the project is successful that will mean the government agency users will start using Outlook as their email client instead of Lotus Notes. As such it's only messaging nothing beyond that and this part is not difficult.
But Lotus Notes client is much more than a email client unlike MS-Outlook through which all the business applications can be built and accessed. Now the issue starts there, to convert all the Lotus Notes applications / Domino web based applications to MS platform.
There is no easy way to convert these applications to rival platform as much as MS touts (even it does at the end of it you are going the same functional application in the MS platform). Recently, i have encountered a customer scenario where they want to convert a Lotus Notes document repository application to MOSS and expect to work in the same fashion. The LN application contains lots of rich text data and MS architect team tried to convert this application using the MS Transporter suite but failed miserably. Not much of the information is transported and is not up to the team's expectation. After trying several rounds, they came to Lotus team for assistance.
So the point here is the government will have plenty of such applications and custom workflow applications, tracking applications, content management applications etc. MS team has to basically rewrite all the existing apps in MOSS platform ( not all the apps can be built in MOSS there are quite a no. of apps that need to built in .NET) and even to move all the data from current Lotus Notes to MOSS they need to work closely work Lotus consultants.
Just wondering if all the applications has to  be rewritten from the scratch what is the ROI we are talking about or the cost savings we are talking about.
I would welcome any thoughts or debate in this...