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Proprietary – Copyright of SCC 1

Smart City Consortium

Response to the PwC Consultancy Report for Smart City Blueprint

29 September 2017


Table Of Content 1. Introduction

2. Smart Mobility

3. Smart Living

4. Smart Environment

5. Smart Economy

6. Smart Government

7. Smart People


1. Introduction The Smart City Consortium (SCC) welcomes the Smart City Blueprint Consultancy Study Report (herein referred as consultancy report) prepared by the PwC Advisory Services Limited for the Office of the Chief Information Officer (OGCIO). SCC has pleasure to submit this paper as part of our response to support the HKSAR Government in defining the strategy and digital framework for implementing smart city projects in Hong Kong. The consultancy report covers 6 major categories and has made over 75 recommendations on smart city development, which also features some pilot projects. SCC believes the consultancy report is very comprehensive and is full of constructive suggestions covering the governance and project management structure, application areas, open data, privacy, pilot projects and potential medium to long-term smart city developments for Hong Kong. The consultancy report recommended over 40 suggestions in 6 major categories defined by Dr. Boyd Cohen - Smart Mobility, Smart Living, Smart Environment, Smart people, Smart Government and Smart Economy.

In this consultancy report, the recommendation to form a new champion organization structure within the government is consistent with the suggestion that SCC had made earlier in our Interim Advisory Report1. In particular, the suggestion of forming a Smart City Steering Committee (SCSC) with representation from across different Bureaus and Departments and the formation of a Smart City Programme Office (SCPO) directly supervised by the SCSC is seen as a crucial and welcomed departure from the traditional way on how the government operates. In addition to this proposed governance and program management structure, we also believe the involvement from industry stakeholders such as a panel consisting of external stakeholders including industry leaders, subject matter experts, legislative council members and academia is also important to ensure complete transparency at the SCSC’s policy making level. This additional recommendation of governance framework enables the proposed SCSC could engage more stakeholders. Furthermore, SCC would like to recommend our HKSAR Chief Executive to chair this SCSC and lead the development of our smart city in Hong Kong.

At SCC, we are in support of the overall vision statement proposed by the consultants and OGCIO.

1 https://smartcity.org.hk/images/eDM/docs/Advisory-Paper-Interim-Report-2016-SCC.pdf

Invite industry leaders and subject matter experts to be part of SCSC. SCSC to be chaired by our HKSAR Chief Executive

SCC will continue to provide advisory and support to the OGCIO in preparing the Hong Kong Smart City Blueprint


“Smart Hong Kong - Embracing innovation and technology to build a strong economy, bring quality living and make Hong Kong a well-known Smart City” In the consultancy report, it has outlined the objectives and challenges ahead to implement Common Spatial Data Infrastructure (CSDI) and related open data policies. On this note, the SCC is glad that the consultancy report was able to suggest the need for both having a CSDI and appointing a Chief Data Officer (CDO) much like other Chicago, Los Angeles2, New York3 and ShenYang4. At SCC, we are in the opinion that the CDO candidate should directly report to SCSC with overall accountability of implementing open data policies and collaboration across different bureaus and departments. As mentioned earlier, SCC has submitted in Oct 2016 an Interim advisory report to the OGCIO, EKEO and also the Planning Department outlining our vision of Hong Kong smart city blueprint. There are a few recommendations proposed in the SCC Interim advisory report that is worth mentioning here again as this was not considered in the consultancy report. Some of these recommendations could be implemented much earlier as real projects testing various Public Private Partnerships (PPP) with various industry stakeholders and promote the adoption of local technologies. In the following sections, we will detail some of our recommendations as our official response to the consultancy report.

2 http://cw.com.hk/opinion/small-data-brings-big-changes-smart-cities 3 http://cw.com.hk/opinion/latest-sdi-developments-hong-kong?page=0,2 4 SCC and OGCIO had met with Shenyang Big Data Bureau on Sep 23, 2017

Support local industry and enterprising solution for quick win and be seen as facilitating smart city growth.


2. Smart Mobility

In the Smart Mobility and intelligent transport area, it is worth noting that the consultancy report has proposed many short and medium to long term initiatives at the airport, ferries, bus interchange, ride sharing, toll-road, facilitating more use of bikes and enabling information access for public transport waiting time to vacancy information from both public parking and private car park operators. In this area, we have the following recommendations.

2.1 Intelligent Signalised Junctions and Pedestrian Lights SCC supports the recommendations in the deployment of intelligent signalised junctions and pedestrian lights – which is also considered as smart street furniture as suggested in the consultancy report. The benefits of installing intelligent signalised junctions and pedestrian lights that optimises traffic signal timing while enhancing pedestrian movement could help to minimise risks and threats associated with traffic flow control. With incidents such as the recent bus accidents in Mongkok5, pedestrian and passengers in public transport (PT) could both benefit from any early warning signals and Many overseas cities have already started to make the traffic signal control system more people-centric, adaptive to pedestrian demands, occupancies and focus on catering for reducing risks, optimizing vehicles and pedestrian movements at different times of day. Additional benefits such as minimising signal cycle time without compromising the conflicting vehicular traffic demand too much. Hong Kong is a unique city with a public transport patronage of 90%. In addition to exploring the use of latest sensors and detection technologies to enable existing traffic signal system to interact with the real-time demand of pedestrian and vehicles, any intelligent signalised junction and pedestrian light project should give priority to public transport vehicles - giving them green time extension and stage recall to public transport on detection, with different priority levels depending on whether they are running on time or late on schedule, to further improve on reliability. With more reliable means of public transport and adaptive traffic signal system, there should be less traffic congestion, which could further improve the air quality and walkability. 2.2 Installation of In-Vehicle Unit (IVU) & Smart Enforcement Installation of IVUs have many different applications and benefits, but apart from acting as a traffic detector collecting real-time traffic data,

5 http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/2112453/more-20-injured-hong-kong-bus-crash-fatalities-feared

People-‐centric intelligent signalized junctions and pedestrian lights as street furniture


these IVUs could also facilitate Electronic Road Pricing (ERP) schemes, as well as settling toll fees. Similar to common practices in many overseas cities, Hong Kong should explore the implementation of Multi-lane Free Flow (MLFF) Tolling on all HK expressways without the need to stop at toll booths, and IVUs could be used to settle the payments. IVU could also take into account of new vehicles-to-everything (V2X) communication technologies and display real-time traffic, hazards and information to the drivers, to warn them of traffic incidents and congestions ahead. Furthermore, the Transport department could explore the possibility to have smart chipsets installed in the driving license label in each car which doubles as an IVU already for vehicles to settle different payments. Police and traffic officers could easily retrieve vehicle’s owner information by scanning the chipset for law enforcement – issuing tickets without the need to write paper copies. 2.3 City-wide Intelligent Traffic Management With all the big data collected through the deployment of traffic detectors and In-Vehicle Units (IVUs) installed, as well as all the potential street furniture infrastructure, connected to citywide communication networks to be put in place to enable V2X and autonomous vehicles in the future, operators in the Traffic / Transport Management Centre would be able to know exactly the real-time traffic conditions in the HK road network. As a long-term goal, the Traffic / Transport Management Centre should have a real-time dynamic traffic model that simulate the effects of traffic incidents, congestions, road works and mega-events based on collected real-time traffic data, compare different recovery plans and recommend the best mitigation measures, to avoid territory-wide congestions. 2.4 Autonomous vehicle (AV) The legal and regulatory matters are one of the major hurdles for the development of autonomous vehicles in Hong Kong. Prior to the comprehensive review and imminent amendment of related laws, regulations and ordinances, an interim measure should be developed to enable the ease of applying for the permits. The Transport department should also publicly consult and engage the public to help establish the requirements and to facilitate AV testing at only selected pilot sites or selected public road sections as in a sandbox environment. In the consultancy report, a small test site for autonomous vehicle has been proposed and at SCC, we believe that additional sandbox test sites should be made available. 2.5 The strategic roadmap to intelligent transport system


Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) is a key component to be discussed in Smart Mobility. ITS could be widely applied in various areas such as traffic control & management, incident detection and handling, relieve of traffic congestion, dissemination of real-time information, encouragement of green transport in Hong Kong to enhance people mobility. Issues like data format, consistency, interval of data collection, proprietary products are causing constraints in system integration and interoperability. It is therefore necessary for the Transport Department and the Smart City Blueprint to be aligned and provide a comprehensive strategic roadmap that does not only focus on the recommendations of individual ITS initiatives; but also holistically define a standardised digital framework so as to encourage more innovation and collaboration among the ITS stakeholders. Along the line of thought in digital framework and open innovations, it is also worth mentioning that one of the key stakeholders within this context are the tunnel operators and the current electronic toll collection operator run by the incumbent operator Autotoll Limited. The government could consider opening up this market by enabling more innovations from the private sector – deploying latest technologies and to create a bigger impact in electronic toll collections. At the recent roundtable meeting organized by OGCIO, we have cited the need to address the motorcyclist’s equal access rights and perhaps allow innovative technology companies to also offer electronic toll collections for motorcycles.

Furthermore, our Hong Kong Smart City Blueprint and open data regime should propose the enabling of transport-related data through the use of open application programming interfaces (API). With a standardized API and open data repository in place, the combination of government agency-owned data, private company-owned data and the crowdsourcing of data from pedestrian and road users alike, this crowdsourcing of traffic-related data could be further analyzed and enhanced to fit for use by any companies for developing innovative applications or for research purpose. The profound impact of this open data strategy will bring bigger impact further down the lifetime value in everyday transport situations. As an example, there are numerous groups in social networks that have the community notifying everyone else about traffic accidents, storm hazards and transport related incidents. These sightings and data are often more accurate and near real-time than any official newsfeed from any news channel from radios or televisions. Data mining and analytics solution to crowd source these transport related datasets for supplementing and building a better open data strategy should be planned.

Taking ownership to implement or develop an All-on-One Transport mobile applications developed by Transport Department is contradictory to the goals and objectives of enabling innovations, encouraging open competitions and entrepreneurship. Around the world, the general direction of smart cities data regime is to have the government prepare

Public as the eyes and ears and crowd source latest information from the public for real time transport information


a digital framework for open data and open API access. At SCC, we recommend the delay of further developing the HKeMobility mobile apps as recommended in the consultancy report to achieve the stipulated short term objective and stay focus in developing the digital open data framework for facilitating the industry to develop innovative applications.


3. Smart Living 3.1 Digital payments and Digital Persona At SCC, we believe that the notions of Smart Living should be related to everyday matters in our living environment, our households, our citizens’ welfare, healthcare and wellbeing. SCC is in the opinion that in the consultancy report, the two topics of digital persona and digital payments, which has been placed in the Smart Living category, are actually quite misleading. SCC would like to suggest that any strategic policy and digital framework relating to digital persona and digital payments in Hong Kong’s Smart City Blueprint should be placed under the category of Smart Economy. It is fair to say that the outcome of a digital payment and electronic identity policy (which is referred to digital persona in the consultancy report), strategic framework and infrastructure could increase the quality of living. It is a means to the end of achieving higher quality living but certainly shouldn’t be placed as a policy and framework recommendation under Smart Living category in today’s smart city blueprint discussion. 3.2 Building a predictive and preventive health platform

Healthy living and aging has been discussed previously in SCC’s Interim advisory report but it is worth reiterating here that Hong Kong’s current senior care and healthcare systems will be under an unprecedented amount of pressure due to the aging population. Meanwhile, aging with dignity is mere fantasy of most senior citizens. In order to facilitate healthy aging in Hong Kong, we believe there could be opportunities to create Proactive, Predictive and Preventative living environments with a holistic smart health system that links up families, neighbors, caregivers and doctors together, to keep our citizens safe, healthy and happy at home. The following has been recommended in SCC’s Interim Advisory Report.

i) Proactive Smart Health Monitoring - An indoor and outdoor smart IoT network could be deployed to sense delta change of real-time individual’s health status, biometric measurements, living habit and social behaviors. These could be integrated ito any smart home devices and ecosystem and could also link up with individual doctor’s clinic and hospital – providing comprehensive health data and knowledge management for each individual. Additional datasets like the amount of exercise being carried out, sleeping profile, dietary intake, would be also useful for health practitioners and for medical research.


ii) Predictive Smart Health Analysis - a big data analytic platform will be designed for digital healthcare professionals to share and discover correlations between environmental changes and associated health risks by integrating raw data and digital health records, with a proprietary algorithm developed to predict acute diseases and provide real-time advice for personalized medical treatment. iii) Preventative Smart Health Community Network: this intelligent ICT solution would involve Government emergency units, medical professionals, and the support from local community organizations. With the availability of electronic health records sharing to authorized professionals, tele-medical consultation could become feasible for patients with chronic illness at home, saving their time and effort to make regular visits to doctors. Precise and personalized medication will also be possible for medical diagnosis based on individuals’ living habits. In the case of any emergency, the Smart Health community network could also deliver immediate alerts to the nearest neighbor to locate the person in need.

This strategy will trigger a paradigm shift for the Hong Kong healthcare system, by changing the traditional reactive medical care approach to a predictive and preventative monitoring. It encourages patients to seek medical advice in the early stages, and helps to alleviate pressure on frontline healthcare workers and reduces the overall cost of treatments. In the consultancy report, recommendations were suggesting the use of wearable devices and at SCC, we are in support of this and would further recommend a holistic approach in using latest smart systems and related IoT sensor technologies instead of just looking at wearables.

3.3 E-Health Record Sharing and open data policies At SCC, we are in support of all of the short term initiatives proposed in the consultancy report, we are also in the opinion that there are increasing need for the Hospital Authority and Food and Health Bureau to provide more data as part of the improved open data regime and through the continuous effort in the Electronic Health Record Sharing System (EHRSS), we believe there has to concrete arrangements in the area of public private partnership which encourage data sharing with open competition and innovations from more private sector. The development of the second stage eHRSS and the patient portal for instance could be done using open data architecture and enable industry ICT service providers to be able to develop its value-added applications. At SCC, we are in support of the view that the second


stage development6 should put emphasis on data standardization and the roadmap to make these data open to authorised ICT service providers. At SCC, we are in the opinion that a level-playing field should be maintained. The authorities should remain neutral and facilitate and support different health care providers and ICT vendors to connect to the eHRSS while upkeeping the data sharing standards, data privacy, interface specifications and interoperability requirements for eHRSS connection.

6 http://www.legco.gov.hk/yr16-17/english/panels/hs/papers/hs20161219cb2-386-8-e.pdf


4. Smart Environment With the celebration of the launch of the Hong Kong’s Climate Ready 2030+ campaign announced by the Environment Bureau of the HKSAR Government, the SCC is excited that there are lots of momentum in promoting green and intelligent buildings. 4.1 Promoting the use of Smart IoT technologies In SCC’s Interim advisory paper sent to OGCIO in Oct 2016, we have pointed out that while the adoption of new building technologies in new development areas is important to the roadmap in constructing new buildings, SCC recommends that the HKSAR Government and the Environment Bureau to investigate how to achieve energy savings with the rest of the old buildings scattered across the cities. According to the Buildings Department, over 85% of the buildings are 10 years or older7 and hence many of which will require some form of retrofitting technologies that could be installed to achieve the energy saving objectives.

Figure 1. Industrial Building in Kowloon Bay

Many residential and industrial buildings in Hong Kong are not going to be able to use the latest chillers technology or district-cooling tower. A

7 http://www.legco.gov.hk/yr09-10/english/hc/sub_leg/sc05/papers/sc050209cb1-1163-1-e.pdf


vast majority of these old buildings and businesses are and will still be using spilt-type air conditioners in both commercial and retail settings. The consultancy report advocates the promotion and support households to utilize smart home mobile apps to monitor house energy consumption only; but failed to address this issue on how sensors and control technologies available today could be incorporated in the short term strategy. The topics of “Sustainable Consumption” is only meaningful if a household or small business could not only just monitor its consumption of electricity but could also use innovative smart IoT devices available today to help control consumption. In Hong Kong, residential use of air conditioning contributes to 34% of the consumption of electricity, and to help solve this problem, a couple of Hong Kong-based technology companies have developed award-winning solutions like Ambi Climate8 and SmartAirCon9 to specifically target at eliminating the peak demand of electricity, reducing green house gas (GHG) emission and reducing the electricity bill and bringing IoT sensors and smart control. Similar product innovations in energy management like smart thermostats (e.g. Google’s Nest) are even subsidized by the local utility company in the United States. At SCC, we believe that the utility companies in Hong Kong could follow suite by subsidizing the installation of these smart IoT devices to help achieve energy saving, reduce electricity bills - thus bringing direct benefit to the people of Hong Kong. 4.2 Renewable energy and energy data policy At SCC, we are in the opinion that there isn’t enough analysis and recommendations in the consultancy report that specifically outline the strain using different forms of renewable energy (solar or wind). There is a need to develop or recommend a standard or framework that perhaps various future Hong Kong’s Smart City projects could target to use alternative form of energy source. (E.g. a private or public car park operator could install solar panel to supply electricity for its own use or for charging electric vehicles). Under the current legislation, it is also unclear who will have ownership of energy measurement and consumption data and this has been brought up by both utilities companies at a roundtable hosted by SCC. In SCC’s Interim report, a CAPCARE system has been proposed and SCC is in the opinion that the two electricity companies should share the energy data. Details of the CAPCARE platform had been presented in the SCC Interim Advisory report.

8 Ambi Climate is the winner of GS1 IoT award winner from Ambi Labs 9 SmartAirCon is the winner of HKIE’s Smart City IoT Competition in 2016 from Remotec Technology Limited


5. Smart Economy

As mentioned earlier, we believe anything to do with digital payments, electronic identity, online commerce and currency regime should be rightfully placed in context under Smart Economy and not Smart Living. 5.1 Digital Payment should be placed in Smart Economy Payment is an essential part of everyday trade in retail and commerce; it is a form of currency exchange being used predominantly for buying services and goods and for merchants to receive funds. This is part of the economy, which is also part and partial of a common and agreeable form of trust system that allows economic activities to happen and thrive. In our view, digital payment is a more innovative form of payments as we see in traditional commerce. For digital payments to happen, it requires the governing authorities and watchdogs to actually help set common standards and establish new regulations (E.g. Hong Kong Customs & Excise department is currently the gatekeeper for issuing licenses for Money Service Operators). Payments, transfers, adding value and any form of digital currency per se do require a lot of monetary policy and regulations to protect consumers’ interests hence explaining the need for standardization and government-led policies. SCC strongly believes digital payment as a strategic objective should be placed under Smart Economy category of commerce and monetary policies. 5.2 Interoperability in digital payments amongst store value facilities licensee There are currently 13 Store Value Facilities (SVF) license issued to different enterprises but there seems to be no central clearing mechanism for the account holders to transfer funds or to add value with real currency. The homogeneous nature of each of these SVF systems is perceived to be incompatible in features and standards. SCC recommends that the HKSAR Government could intervene as suggested by the consultancy report to enhance the payment infrastructure and act as a middleman to facilitate this digital payment across these different SVFs to various retail banking customers. A holistic review by the relevant departments is urgently needed to define the interoperability requirements for different machines with different protocols for different SVF licensees. In Singapore, the Money Authority of Singapore (MAS) have planned out to form a new governance model for payments10 and this includes unifying the Electronic Fund Transfer and Point of Sales (EFTPOS) system. A

10 http://www.mas.gov.sg/News-and-Publications/Media-Releases/2016/MAS-Sets-Out-Strategies-for-Electronic-Payments-in-Singapore.aspx


similar roadmap for Hong Kong is critically important to making all the SVF licensees and existing payment solutions interoperable. We strongly recommend the Hong Kong Monetary Authority and the OGCIO to openly discuss how a holistic digital payment roadmap for Hong Kong for digital payments inlcuding cash top-up, e-checks from banks in Hong Kong. KPMG11 was the lead consultant appointed by the Singapore Government to investigate and deliver this roadmap, it would be beneficial to all stakeholders to have an open forum organised by the HKMA to further engage in formulating a plan and have KPMG to share some of their experience in Singapore. 5.3 Trade Single Window for Smart Economy

In our Interim Advisory report, we have made recommendations on the Trade Single Window (SW). It is worth reiterating that the SW, which is considered as one important Smart Economy and Smart Government initiatives led by Custom and Excise Department and the Commerce and Economic Development Bureau12, was surprisingly not mentioned in the consultancy report at all.

Figure 2. API for Trade Single Window (SW)

Hong Kong has a vibrant trade economy and the need to modernize our trade related systems in B2G, G2G - allowing the use of open application programing interfaces for related parties to exchange trade-related data should be discussed and reviewed. SCC has suggested in

11 http://bit.ly/2btRbsQ 12 http://www.cedb.gov.hk/citb/en/Hot_Topic/trade_single_window.html


the Interim Advisory Paper last year that our Hong Kong Smart City Blueprint will need to put more effort into this as well as defining the requirements for electronic identities for enterprises.

5.4 The need for IT governance At the Smart City Consortium, we believe the best practices and standards like ISO/IEC 15408-1:2009, also known as the Common Criteria, should be adopted in the HKSAR Government’s upcoming smart city blueprint. Furthermore, the Government through the OGCIO should also consider building its own IoT security certification center that follows the Common Criteria. The adoption of this standard is expected to provide evidence and traceability of the IoT-related products. It also helps these products conform to minimum security standards and formulate a governance framework suitable to combat any potential risks in data management. Consumer electronic products may not require the highest level of certification, as compared to the enterprise systems such as payment terminals or mission-critical sensors-based systems. It is nonetheless necessary for the government to start thinking about the need for certification and the associated talents. Another area the government should consider is formulating a strategy in Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL). EAL is a numerical grade assigned following the completion of the Common Criteria security evaluation. Consisting of seven levels, the EAL level does not measure the security of the system itself, it simply states at what level the system was tested. EAL can also help to protect Bluetooth-enabled devices, which are also adopted in smart city initiatives. With the new Bluetooth 5.0 standards providing higher performance, wider reach and better connectivity, it is essential for associated attacks like Bluejacking, Bluesnarfing or Bluebugging to be minimized with the EAL certification. To put this in perspective, the ISO/IEC15408 Common Criteria has been adopted since 2009 in Taiwan and a similar standard has also been adopted by the China Information Technology Security Evaluation Centre in China. The proper establishment of IoT security certification centre will greatly enhance and safeguard our city’s infrastructure for both enterprises and consumer homes where Internet-connected electronics are placed and could be vulnerable and become targets for online security attack such as DDoS that could be generated by the various connected sensors and IoT devices.


6. Smart Government

The consultancy report under the category of Smart Living has defined electronic identity as digital persona. This is a good narrative to describe the need for identifying our citizens that are engaged in all kinds of electronic online transactions or services from the government, trade and in day to day commerce. However, the consultancy report has not elaborated the need for electronic identity for government, NGOs, business entities and multi-national companies. SCC supports the need for our Hong Kong Smart City Blueprint to look beyond the concept of digital persona; and recommend to establish an enterprise electronic certification network license mechanism to support smart city development in Hong Kong. 6.1 Need for an enterprise electronic certification network license mechanism

As mentioned earlier, SCC is supportive of the notion of digital persona suggested in the consultancy report, the connotation of digital persona seems to limit its use to people only. In our opinion, the regulatory regime in electronic identities should have two components – namely an individual electronic certification network license and an enterprise electronic certification network license. A future-proof electronic identity system should also be capable to handle a variety of actors in the network namely businesses (B), government departments (G) and consumers (C). Considering the combination of different use cases like B2G, B2C, B2B, G2G, G2C and C2C, the electronic identities regime should adopt a more holistic approach. In this fashion, the enterprise electronic certification network license is the sole license for government bureaus, organizations, schools and corporations to conduct actual e-commerce activities or e-transactions on the Internet.

6.2 Growing Internet economy relies on trusted transactions As an international financial center, Hong Kong should look beyond and ensure that our electronic identity regime will be compatible for both international standards and China’s national standards. A smart city should thrive well by having a government-led and secured environment for conducting all kinds of online transactions. Since the enactment of the Electronic Transactions Ordinance (Cap. 553) ("ETO") in January 2000, public certification authority is authorized to certify electronic signatures with the same legal status as handwritten signatures. Looking forward, with the rapid growth of many B2G and B2C transactions, it is necessary for the Hong Kong smart city blueprint to ensure regulation of the process to authenticate digital persona and enterprises identities to avoid fraudulent, phishing e-mails and counterfeiting activities similar to those reported by HKMA13.

13 http://www.hkma.gov.hk/eng/other-information/fraudulent-bank-websites.shtml


6.3 Suggestions in setting up the Enterprise Electronic Certification Network License mechanism

We have listed out below a series of recommendations as a reference and welcome the opportunity to exchange ideas with the OGCIO regarding the Enterprise electronic certification network license. i) Adopt the legislated ETO to provider legal protection to the

transactions among the government bureaus, organizations and corporations holding electronic certification network license;

ii) Collaborate with the Hong Kong Domain Name Registration Company Limited to examine the Business and Company Registration certificates and website addresses of government bureaus, organizations and corporations, and then bind the official recognized enterprise electronic certification network Licenses with official websites.

iii) Disseminate and actively use the enterprise electronic

certification network license on websites of enterprises, government bureaus, non-profit organizations and other industries to set up a cyber security mechanism covering all different use cases;

iv) The local government certificate authority could make use of the

database of both the individual and enterprise network license holders’ information and the root certificates of Hong Kong government to prevent any potential breaches, eavesdropping or leakage.

v) Create a public electronic network licence platform which bridges

the government bureaus, organizations and corporations with enterprise electronic certification network license, and the holders of individual electronic certification network license for completing transactions;

vi) A third-party auditor could audit annually on the local government

certificate authority in issuing enterprise electronic certification network licenses to the government bureaus, organizations and corporations. This could insure that it meets the national standard and the data privacy ordinance.


6.4 Government’s role in defining common spatial data interfaces (CSDI) At SCC, we are glad to see that the consultancy report has suggested the need for a standard common spatial data interfaces and associated framework and timeline to implement this. We would like to provide the following suggestions about the distinction of product-based SDI and process-based SDI. Despite efforts to encourage the sharing of spatial data, the various government departments were focusing on internal requirements and hence developing and operating a product-based SDI. This means government departments, as data providers, create and maintain spatial data on a regular or ad hoc basis according to the needs of internal government and external public users. Data flow is one-way—from the providers to the users. Given this condition, these datasets can hardly be integrated with external datasets. The major limitation of this approach is that it hardly meets a wide spectrum of user requirements on data type, data format and updating frequency. Meanwhile, in the private sector, there are also other SDI developments. The HKSTP recently set up the Data Studio to encourage open data exchange among various stakeholders including academics, startups, ICT companies, NGOs and research institutes. The main objective is to enable different stakeholders to use the data depository to exchange and develop applications for smart city development. This platform is regarded as a process-based SDI. Under this operational mechanism, HKSTP plays the role of a “middleman” responsible for inviting potential data users and providers to participate in data sharing and exchange. HKSTP only makes necessary arrangements for data transfer between the providers and users in the format of APIs, but the datasets are not owned or managed by HKSTP. One of the benefits of this approach is that it allows data users to make direct requests to the providers, allowing “tailor-made” datasets to meet the users’ needs. In addition, data flow in a process-based SDI can be multi-directional. Users not only consume information from the providers, they can also contribute updated information of a specific geographic location. This enriched spatial dataset can be shared with all interested parties through the SDI. Unlike the government’s product-based SDI approach, in the process-based SDI, the datasets shared through Data Studio are not static – but instead these datasets will evolve and grow.

Developing SDIs involves substantial resource inputs. Hence, it would be more economical and cost-effective for the HKSAR Government and the private sector to implement SDIs in a coordinated manner. This could be facilitated by OGCIO. But the major challenge is to identify an operational framework for SDI that allows both the Government and various stakeholders to work in partnership to benefit the entire


community. There are a few successful examples around the world for public-private partnership of SDI development. The National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) in USA, the SNIG in Portugal and the multinational INSPIRE initiative in Europe are some. It is therefore in our opinion that the most desirable framework for SDI development in Hong Kong will be where an integrated operation of the product-based SDI (operated by the government in the format of CSDI) and the process-based SDIs (maintained by HKSTP and the private sector) in a coordinated manner. SCC recommends the Government to define the framework for this newly developed CSDI that could serve as a major data provider to the process-based SDIs maintained by the private sector. This helps to overcome the inherent issues of product-based SDI mentioned earlier. The authorities should consider setting up standards. It is not only for integrating different government’s SDIs, but also for facilitating data transfer with external SDIs. The authorities should also consider expanding the core datasets to include economic and social information. This encourages data sharing between public and private sectors, as well as different cross-industry smart city development. The government should also collect more extensive feedback from the public by conducting frequent surveys on data requirements. It should also consider releasing more datasets, providing quality metadata and improving the data quality. For the private sector, SCC suggests that the HKSTP further enhance the Data Studio by allowing easy integration with data collected from the government’s upcoming CSDI. In addition, HKSTP could encourage more stakeholders to participate by offering greater incentives to data users and providers. In a market-driven economy, one of the major considerations of data providers is the benefit and the ROI from sharing data.


7. Smart People At SCC, we strongly believe in the need for Hong Kong to continue investing into talent development and cultivation. The consultancy report has also addressed the need for our society to have more students and graduates being trained with knowledge in ICT and in particular data science discipline. At the recent roundtable hosted by OGCIO with industry stakeholders, SCC have also pointed out that the need for more students and graduates familiar with cyber security will be increasing. Our future smart city and our public safety will have a high dependency on the resilience and stability of our digital communication networks and ICT infrastructure. In the foreseeable future, our society will benefit from more investment into developing certified programme specifically in qualifying for ICT graduates to be capable to also take on careers in online security in addition to data science. 7.1 Incorporate coding classes in primary school curriculum The Education Department has offered various funding (often once-off) to promote the adoption of STEM classes in schools. At SCC, we would like to also point out that ICT curriculum should make a bold step to include coding classes at primary school level and allow our future school leavers with basic coding skills and to allow them to develop an interests in technology sector. According to the OGCIO14, there are 2,200 ICT graduates every year and an overall talent pool of 83,000 working in various industries. These two numbers are not meaningful if one doesn’t look beyond and take a qualitative measurement on the need of what specific skills are required for the new millennial. 7.2 Industry Attachment We would also like to reiterate the need for a deeper training scheme for engineering research students who could jointly receive funding support from Small-Medium Enterprises (SME) as well as the Government’s support when engaging in a research degree programme and co-develop intellectual property rights (IPR). By doing so, SMEs can excel, skillful engineers and professionals could be trained and equipped to a higher standard, and IPRs will be generated. Many SMEs also have also the need to stay competitive by upgrading and transforming themselves through developing IPRs, and this deeper training scheme allows science and engineering research projects to be more aligned with industry expectations. This deeper training programme is to propose a novel way to cultivate talent and is observed as a departure from the traditional research funding schemes available

14 Fact Sheet http://www.ogcio.gov.hk/en/facts/doc/Fact_Sheet-HK_as_ICT_Hub-EN.pdf


from academic institutions. The current research funding are useful for developing scholars but often failed to match with the human capital requirements for the industry. In recent years, there is a trend at undergraduate level whereby universities and colleges are placing the students to work for enterprises and government department in industry attachment. This model is increasingly welcome by enterprises and firms and at SCC, we strongly believe this model should be extended to research students where specific intellectual property could be co-developed and knowledge could be acquired.

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