Chang San-cheng on the Government Cloud

Chang argues that the key obstacles to the government’s creation of clouds aren’t technological. Instead, they are parochialism, lack of cooperation between local and central government, and the public’s worries about the exposure of personal information.

On the other hand, he sees opportunities in fields such as medical care and education, where computer systems are in place but have yet to be integrated. The government is therefore pushing for institutions to standardize their formatting of data and share it via the cloud with the objective of making it available to the public for use in their everyday lives. Chang believes that there is a pressing need for such government-run clouds because they can provide such tremendously valuable services to the public.

Under the plan proposed by the Executive Yuan’s Board of Science and Technology (BOST), the various government clouds will deal with healthcare, food safety, education, and disaster prevention and relief. But the construction of such clouds raises a fundamental question: will differences in broadband deployment create disparities between cloud services in urban and rural areas?

The government’s next cloud project will target education. In the photo, tablet computers see ­action in elementary-school art education.

Perhaps not. According to Chang, data from the National Communications Commission (NCC) shows that Chunghwa Telecom is the primary provider of broadband services to Taiwan’s remote areas. “In some areas, broadband has already been deployed but no one has signed up. The lines are just lying there doing nothing.” That’s a waste of broadband resources. He adds that broadband connections could also be rolled out very quickly to areas that don’t yet have them.

To address the rural broadband issue, Chang has asked the NCC to establish an information portal and regularly post updates on the status of Internet access in remote regions. The idea is that doing so would allow these areas to take advantage of broadband connections in a more timely fashion.

On the other hand, Chang also stresses that ensuring the equal availability of broadband services in both urban and rural areas doesn’t give agencies license to go their own way. He cites the rollout of the police cloud as a case in point. Taiwan’s various counties and municipalities have purchased a wide array of street-monitoring equipment without establishing shared standards, which has given rise to problems with the format of images in cases involving multiple jurisdictions. “If we’re going to build a proper police cloud, we first need to build a security camera cloud,” says Chang.

He believes that the right model for deploying cloud services involving the public welfare, such as online education and the sharing of electronic medical records, is one in which the central government leads and local governments play a supporting role. He worries that if local governments build their own clouds, their more limited resources will lead to less-than-perfect results.

Chang has compared himself to an information and communications technology salesman. His “product” is applying information technology and his “customers” are government ministries and departments with relevant cloud content.

Take the food cloud, for example. Because it is currently under the oversight of the Ministry of Economic Affairs, the bulk of its information concerns the production of processed foods in factories. It largely ignores the agricultural products that are the foundation of all of these processed foods. Chang says that this lack was the driving force behind the proposal to turn administration of the food cloud over to the Council of Agriculture.

Chang held a number of positions prior to becoming a government minister. He was a professor in National Taiwan University’s Department of Civil Engineering, did a stint at the National Science Council during which he helped establish the National Center for High-Performance Computing, and went on to spend 10 years as vice president of Acer’s e-Business Group. In 2010, he left Acer to become Google’s COO for Asia-Pacific Infrastructure.

“I’m certain the government will complete the implementation of its cloud services blueprint within 10 years,” says Chang. “I’m not at all certain it will do so within three years because I don’t have that kind of control.”

Chang’s business background makes him particularly pragmatic in his implementation of policy, gives him a perspective on issues that is more in tune with the public’s needs, and inclines him to be forthright about how much he can do.

What follows are key points from his interview with Taiwan PanoramA:

Q: The public is deeply concerned about the issue of food safety. How does the food cloud address it?

A: The food cloud will at the very least enable the tracking of products through the supply chain. The government and the public grasp the concept of production records. The problem is that the records don’t cover enough products. Consumers recognize CAS and GMP labels as marking safe products, but the labels only denote a certification; they are not tools for tracking food safety.

The food cloud unites quality certifications and tracking tools. It allows consumers to use their smartphones to access a product’s records by scanning the barcode on the product’s packaging. Moreover, in the event of a food-safety incident, the cloud-based data allows the government to immediately identify the problem firm and order the relevant products removed from store shelves.

Q: We’ve been promoting electronic medical records for a decade. Why are we still unable to fully share such records?

A: The promotion of electronic medical records and the foundations laid by the National Health Insurance system have established a baseline for the computerization of our medical system, but we aren’t yet in a position to extend the sharing of such records to neighborhood clinics. The main reason is that the cost of the necessary gateways is too high for small and medium-sized clinics, and you can’t share records without the gateways.

I have therefore asked the DOH to look into whether it can place these gateways on public servers. The use of such cloud-based gateways would broaden the sharing of medical records. Technologically speaking, it’s easy to do, and the DOH is already investigating the possibility.

Q: Medical records contain extremely private information. Is it safe putting them in the cloud?

A: In the cloud era, the public is likely to feel greater trust in the government than in individual hospitals and clinics. In the event that the public is uncomfortable participating in the cloud system because of the large volume of personal data it deals with, the government can create a “personal cloud.” This would allow hospitals to access an individual’s personal cloud only after obtaining the person’s consent. Such consent would provide the hospital only a single access to the records and the hospital would not be permitted to retain copies. We believe that this approach would likely alleviate people’s concerns and allow for the more rapid development of the cloud.

Q: What comes after the medical and food clouds?

A: An education cloud. I have two requirements for this cloud. The first involves online education: we need to quickly organize educational materials and get them into the cloud. Once the resources are there, local governments need to direct schools to make use of them.

The second is the rollout of an email cloud to manage students’ email accounts. We need to establish the kind of cooperative relationship Stanford University has established with Google and its Gmail service, which allows students to continue using these email accounts after they graduate. This email cloud can also support domestic business in that we can use these tens of thousands of student accounts to grow one or two domestic firms to global scale and hone their capabilities.

Q: Don’t you worry about creating some predatory megacorporation?

A: The fact is, it’s very difficult for smaller companies to compete in the cloud. On the whole, giants like Google, Face­book, and Apple have undoubtedly had a more positive than negative impact on human society, and I see no chance of these companies merging into a single monopolistic entity. Facebook and Google are beating each other to a pulp in web services, while Google and Apple are battling it out in the smartphone sector. There won’t be a single, all-encompassing monopolist in technology. If one company is doing well in some area, others will attempt to compete. That’s the bedrock principle of business competition.