AS IT IS supposed to be, and as far as I could recall, line Departments of the government are only supposed to get involved up to the level of programs, but not into projects. Ideally, projects should be conducted by the private sector, based on the programs developed or introduced by the government.
I have no doubt that the main motive of the private sector is to profit from the use of technology, but that does not mean that they are devoid of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR).
I even heard one of the captains of industry say that the corporate world should go into products and services that would serve society, but still earn profits from whatever it is that they are doing.
I just hope that many more industry leaders would listen to him, so that we could have a better world to live in.
Meanwhile, it seems that all governance could now be run or implemented by using Information and Communications Technology (ICT), and that would be a good thing if only the government could do more in driving technology to make it work for the good of the people, while it could also do good for the investors who are making business prosper.
Looking ahead however, it seems that the government has to move faster, because ICT is now evolving faster than it ever has, and 5G connectivity and the Internet of Things (IOT) are not the only game changers.
Just to put everything in the right perspective, we should say outright that 5G is just another means of communications, and therefore it is still part of ICT too.
IOT, on the other hand, could be considered as a genuine convergent technology at the outset, because it is both an information technology and a communications technology.
To simplify matters however, we can just say that 5G is a faster carrier for both ICT and IOT, if we must insist on separating one from the other.
Without any doubt, we could say that 5G is yet another communications technology that the telcos could profit from, and we could only home that their CSR programs could drive them to put this new technology to work for the good of the people.
There is, however, a bright side to this, because IOT is not entirely telco dependent. In other words, there are many other carriers that IOT could use.
In a manner of speaking, it could be said that these other carriers are the “natural” means of communications that are genuinely “open source” from the time of God’s creation./PN
