​10 September 2005

Royal Berkshire, Jerudong Park Polo Club, Brunei Darussalam

 Bismillahir Rahmanir Rahim

Assalamualaikum Warahmatullahi Wabarakatuh and Good Morning,

This has been an exciting week! Last Friday saw the launching of 3G mobile services in Brunei Darussalam. Another significant milestone was just a couple of days ago when the inaugural National Summit on Information Society or NASIS had just concluded with a recommendation for a Strategy Paper on Brunei Darussalam Information Society. When the rest of the world is seriously addressing policies and strategies for a global information society, Brunei Darussalam is no exception. E-strategies will be laid out in a diligent yet careful manner. Government, industry and all other stakeholders will all play a role in creating an information society for our country.

While these events are still fresh in our mind, let me this morning talk about one of the key drivers towards realizing an information society. I will talk about e-business and four of its critical success factors we wish to happen in Brunei Darussalam

Firstly, there will have to be an enabling telecommunications and IT or ICT infrastructure in place. The Government of His Majesty the Sultan and Yang Di-Pertuan of Brunei Darussalam is indeed very serious about this where under its 8^th National Development Plan (2001-2005), a total of B$526 million or almost 7.2 % of the total development budget has been allocated to provide basic IT infrastructure. This serves as a step towards the establishment of modern and sophisticated IT facilities and service networks.

With that, I am happy to note that Brunei Darussalam has place a fully advanced digital network infrastructure, the Next Generation Networks or NGN. We hope to see more new developments in ICT in the next 5 years with the 9^th National Development Plan 2006-2010 coming into place, particularly in our efforts to develop the e-business sector in the country.

The second success factor for e-business development I wish to touch on, is for an enabling environment to be in place. This has also been highlighted in the recent NASIS where issues among others such as privacy protection, consumer trust, protection of intellectual property rights and creating a trustworthy, transparent, non-discriminatory legal, regulatory and policy environment are necessary for e-business to strive. In this regard, I believe efforts will be done to continuously review and develop where necessary, on those legal and regulatory frameworks that we now have, so as to cater to the needs of a potentially developing e-business sector in the country.

Thirdly, Content Development is also a key success factor to our national e-business development. In most parts of the world, content industries, software, music, computer games, broadcasting represent powerful examples of the shift from the manufacture of physical items to the manufacture of high value intangibles. I believe these are becoming the drivers of the ICT software and e-business industry.

Finally, the fourth critical success factor will be the ICT-skilled manpower or ICT talent. Skills are becoming important for us all. This is recognised in the Strategy Paper recommended by NASIS in which capacity building of human resources through education and training are all very essential not only in building e-business capable firms but to the overall society. In short, it is paramount in fuelling an e-literate community of people who will become competitive and highly demanded in the local and global market. With a current recorded statistics of about 10 ICT training centers and less than 200 ICT local companies in the country, we seriously hope to achieve better figures in the next few years.

In this context I wish to urge local companies and their foreign partners to give serious attention to develop human capacity building in ICT by engaging and utilizing local talents and graduates and develop their potentials to the fullest. In this way you will also be able to provide employment opportunities to the locals.

Ladies and gentlemen,

With the successful launching and very encouraging participation of every sector of the economy in the making of the e-strategy paper of Brunei Darussalam Information Society, we have a challenge to make the vision, objectives, and targets a reality. e-Business will be one of the focus area the Ministry of Communications wishes to pursue. I look forward to see the involvement of the private sector and other government agencies work together to ensure the smooth implementation of the e-Business.

Lastly, I would like to take this opportunity to thank the organizers for inviting me to this auspicious event. My heartiest congratulations to Microsoft Market Development Partner (MDP) and wish them every success in this new and exciting venture.

Thank you.