From Third World to First The Singapore Story pdfdrive com

Small Steps Towards IT
The digital revolution is changing the way we live and work. The Internet and its
multiple offspring will require all who want to be in the mainstream of the new
economy to be computer-Internet literate.
I was an early enthusiast of the use of computers, which became an
important factor in increasing our productivity. In 1973, when my son Loong
completed his Mathematics Tripos II at Cambridge, I encouraged him to do a
postgraduate course in Computer Science because I thought it a valuable tool for
calculations and storing data. I also asked the Public Service Commission to
offer outstanding students postgraduate courses in computers. One of them, Teo
Chee Hean, as minister for education in 1997, started a programme for teachers
to use computers as a teaching tool with one computer for every two students.
In 1984 I decided that the government pay all employees through GIRO.
Many clerical and manual workers preferred to receive cash, saying they did not
want their wives to know their pay. I met these objections by opening Post
Office Savings Bank (POSBank) accounts for them so that they could draw cash
from automatic teller machines. This did away with police escorts for
transporting cash on pay days, twice a month. The private sector followed suit.
We then encouraged the payment of taxes and licence fees by GIRO.
But while I spearheaded the early drive for computerisation and payments by
electronic transfer, I did not myself use a PC although they had become
common. When younger ministers e-mailed each other in the mid-1990s, I had
my e-mail printed out and responded by fax. Left “out of the loop”, I decided at
72 to take instructions. For the greying generation, it was not easy. It was many
months before I could work my MS Word and e-mail without help every now
and again from my secretaries. Even much later I would lose a file into a black
hole because I had clicked the wrong icon. Or the PC would accuse me of having
“performed an illegal operation” and threaten to shut down. At the office
secretaries would help out. At home, I would ring up Loong, who after listening
to my tale of woe, would guide me step by step on the phone to retrieve my
hours of hard work that had been lost. When this failed he would come on
Sunday to search through my C disk for the missing file or solve some other
mystery. It was more than a year before I was comfortable with my PC. One
benefit was the ease with which I could amend and rearrange sentences and
paragraphs on screen when writing this book. Now I would not travel without
my laptop to access my e-mail.

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