Interview with Mrs Tan King Ing, Deputy Director of Open Source Software Competency Centre, MAMPU, Prime Minister's Department of Malaysia.
Can you describe briefly the history of your organisation?
Malaysia Administration Modernisation and Management Planning Unit (MAMPU) is a central agency in the Prime Minister's Department in charge of the administrative modernisation and management planning for the Public Sector.
The history of MAMPU in regards to Public Sector Open Source Software (OSS) Programme can be traced back to 2002 when the government of Malaysia (GOM) decided to encourage the development and implementation of OSS in the Public Sector where MAMPU was then entrusted to carry out the OSS implementation plan.
As a result of this initiative, the Malaysian Public Sector OSS Master Plan was launched on 16 July 2004 with the purpose to encourage and guide the Public Sector to adopt, develop and pervasively use OSS. In conjunction with this launching, the Open Source Competency Centre (OSCC) was established as a national reference centre to lead and support OSS implementation through out the Public Sector.
What are the vision and objectives of MAMPU in regards of OSS?
MAMPU's vision is creating and enhancing the value of using OSS within the Public Sector ICT framework in providing efficient, secure and quality service. Our objectives are:
- To provide the direction in the development and use of OSS,
- To create greater awareness on OSS,
- To provide information, expertise and physical infrastructure to support OSS implementation,
- To facilitate collaboration between the Government and OSS Industry in the areas of education, Research and Development (R&D),
- To contribute to the development to local OSS expertise.
Why are you promoting Open Source?
We realized that the use of OSS will help to move the Malaysian Government ICT services to one level higher and also help to boost our GDP growth. This is in line with the OSS benefits such as:
Strategic
- OSS provides an excellent opportunity for human capital development and innovating,
- Lower entry barrier to OSS market to encourage competition,
- OSS transparency would enhance security and sovereignty.
Technology
- OSS increases interoperability with legacy applications;
- OSS promotes global community support and increases technological superiority, and
- OSS enables customization and localization.
Economic
- OSS increases software market competition,
- OSS generates savings and the nation will be able to reduce technology imports and increase savings in foreign exchange
- OSS paves the way for vendor independence,
Social Benefits
- Provide wider access to Information to sections of community, and
- OSS helps to reduce digital divide.
What are the benefits of Open Source in the public sector “in your country”? Can you tell us about ongoing activities in this fields?
The benefits of OSS for us are manifold, such as:
- Human resources competency development
- Monetary savings gained can be allocated for training to increase ICT competency instead.
- Promote creativity and innovations via R&D
R&D is an effective way to achieve our objective to increase the development of local OSS expertise. Eventually, this will help to reduce dependency on external parties.
- Ease interoperability with legacy applications
Interoperability promotes the adoption of open standards that enable the exchange of data between new and legacy applications.
- Reduce vendor lock-in: Open standards give the flexibility to switch between different software packages, platforms and vendors.
- Effective public service delivery: Employee OSS skills and experience can be reused when staff is transferred.
Ongoing Activities: Our OSS Master Plan is now in Phase II with full endeavor to accelerate OSS usage through out the Public Sector. Some of the ongoing activities during this phase includes:
- OSS Adoption Seminars. Conducted in 2008 covering 4 regional areas to create awareness on OSS for Public Sector agencies.
- Annual Malaysian Government Open Source Software Conference (MyGOSSCON). MyGOSSCON 2007 and 2008 were successfully held attracting over 1400 participants in combination, including participation from private sector and OSS communities.
- OSS talk, presentation and OSCC Products demo. OSCC MAMPU is providing such service and support to Public Sector agencies who is interested to implement OSS.
- OSS Case Studies Award presentation. OSS Case Study Award is an incentive to recognize and reward Public Sector agencies who has use OSS effectively and in innovative manner.
- OSS Technical Support. Dedicated Technical Support team was setup to assist Public Sector agencies in implementing and maintaining the OSS.
- Training. OSCC MAMPU conducts regular weekly training on the use and administration of OSS to further raise the level of OSS
competency. - OSS Certifications. We have introduced the Public Sector OSS Certifications namely Certified Linux Administrator 01 (CLA01) in October 2008 and CLA02 in December 2008.
- R&D Services. OSCC MAMPU provides R&D facilities for OSCC Products development, testing and porting.
What are the benefits of Open Source in the private sector in your country? and you tell us about ongoing activities in this fields?
There are many technical and operational benefits that can be reaped by the Malaysian Private Sector such as:
- Opportunity to increase revenue through OSS based ICT services. Businesses have the opportunities to provide more OSS
services due to more than 50% increase in OSS adoption by the Public Sector agencies. - Develop and grow OSS developer community. OSS communities specializing in technical area of OSS are constantly growing to meet the OSS demands.
- Reduce total cost of ownership. The absence of licensing fee would yield better profit due to reduction in capital expenditure.
- Optimise resources by encouraging smart partnership Smart Partnership encourages the Private Sector involvement in R&D activity to support specific Public Sector agencies need.
Ongoing Activities: An online facility called e-Market Place was developed to provide an avenue for the private sectors to publish their OSS business profiles. Businesses need to register at http://knowledge.oscc.org.my in variouscategories such as application, desktop, infrastructure and training.
What are the benefits of Open Source for the citizens in your country? Can you tell us about ongoing activities in this fields?
The main benefit for the citizen is the freedom to use and modified the software for their specific functional usage.
Localization is one of the area that can be benefited as users are able to modify the OSS to fulfill the unique requirements of our diversified region of culture.
- Bestari.Comm is a Terengganu State Government community project where they have trained over 20000 public servants and community people.
- KPerak is also a community project by Perak State Government where they have managed to train more than 6300 public servants and community people.
Do you think open source will increase innovation in your country? Why and how?
Yes it will . Open source software goes along with ample of good things. They are inexpensive, sharable, and creates alternatives to monopolistic proprietary software. There is a range of innovative projects undertaken by the government agencies such as:
- Veterinary Information System by Pahang State Government . The system won Veterinary Services Department Malaysia Innovation Award in 2007 and is being evaluated for nationwide adoption. The new OSS base system leads to faster processing of various kinds of veterinary permits and accurate checking. The usage of open source development frameworks prove effective private-public partnership.
- MOH CUBE by ICT Department, Ministry of Health. Over RM5 Million was saved by using this OSS application and currently is being used nationally by over 135 hospitals. Adherence to Open Standards enabled users to be able to access email on a variety of devices including PDA and Mobile Phones.
What is the state of art of open source in your country and what are your predictions of open source in your country?
OSS is being widely adopted across all the major verticals including public, educational, financial and services sectors, and even within small and medium enterprises. For example:
- Terengganu State e-Government application was developed using OSS with the objectives to: Improved service delivery on Government to government (G2G), Government to Business (G2B), Government to Citizen (G2C) dan Government to non-citizen (G2NC)
- Embun: A Malaysian version of Ubuntu. Embun is a free operating system, based on the very popular Ubuntu Linux, with a Malaysian flavor. The distribution was created especially for Malaysian people.
For the coming years, Malaysian developers involvement and contribution in OSS community projects is anticipated go one level higher mainly due to the full support provided by the government.
Read more in: http://www.mampu.gov.my/
