Harris Miller, WITSA President talks to Intercomms about the
World Congress on Information Technology (WCIT) 2006
Q:What do you hope to achieve at the end of the
WCIT 2006? A: There are several success boxes to tick. One is
content. We expect the programme to be very rich.
The organisers, working with us, have already lined
up some well-known leaders in the industry. We
are also working to secure very well known
political and media leaders. We are also producing
a meaningful vision of some of the future
opportunities. That is a lot of why people come to
the event. We want to make sure they have an
opportunity to experience the views of some of the
leading minds out there in terms of what the
future will hold.
Q:Who are on the confirmed list? A: They already have Michael Dell, Texas' Governor
Perry, Anne Mulcahy, the CEO of Xerox, Hector
Ruiz, CEO of AMD, John Thompson CEO of
Symantec, Michael Capellas, the CEO of MCI and
Paul Otellini the CEO of Intel.
We are hoping to get some senior political
figures, but they can't be lined up eleven months
in advance. We are hoping for something close to
2000 attendees, from probably 80-100 countries.
Attendees tend to be very senior executives from
around the world. Again it will be a mixture of
industry folks as well as academics, governments
and the user community.
Q:What are you doing in terms of drumming up
support for the event? A: It is very much a systematic marketing
campaign. One aspect if this is that we travel
around the world speaking at events promoting the
WCIT. I was in Russia earlier this year, keynoting a
conference in St Petersburg and I have been in
London, Sri Lanka, the Philippines too. Later this
year I will be in Tunisia, Kuala Lumpur and Hong
Kong doing the same. I, and the senior staff at the
World Congress are speaking at a range of other
locations around the world. There is a lot of
visibility. Secondly, we work directly through the
WITSA membership in 67 countries and use them
for outreach. Each has a membership in their own
country to whom they reach out. We provide them
the appropriate marketing information and
materials to get that out. We also try and work
with governments in trying to make sure they are
aware and participate. Historically we have had
good participation from senior officials at previous
World Congresses and we expect that to occur
again. Lastly we do some limited advertising - it's
not a mass-market kind of event but we do use
certain publications.
Q:What makes it unique? A: There are obviously many IT conferences around
the world. A few things make us different. First, we
are not a trade show. It is different from CeBIT,
where attendance is in the hundreds of thousands
but a lot of those people are there for show and
tell as part of the major exhibit halls. WCIT is not
a place to collect mouse pads and golf balls.
Secondly, it's the kind of event where you do have
very senior executives. This is focussed on
business leadership in the business world - the
Davos of the IT industry. This is much more
focused on business and government and society
than it is on particular technical issues. Thirdly, it
isn't an opportunity for companies to advertise or
promote their own companies. It really is a chance
to come together on common issues. You don't
talk about specific things that your company is
doing or could be doing at WCIT.
Q:As with any social event, you put people
together but they won't necessarily talk. In the
role of host what does WITSA intend to do
'matchmake' at WCIT? A: First we enable people to do some pre-event
matchmaking, allowing them to use the Internet
and allowing people looking for specific business
opportunities and partnerships to know in advance
who will be there and pre-arrange on-on-one and
small meeting while they are there. We really do
emphasise these social events and activities and
they always been one of the great events at the
World Congress. During meals, we try and create
an environment of large open spaces where people
can be introduced more easily to each other. We
enable people to communicate easily while at the
event by providing them devices so that they can
easily get in touch with other people and then we
try and ensure we have plenty of fun social
activities. Obviously the people of Texas are going
to show off some their country music, something
it is renowned for. We know this is all about people
and getting people to meet is critical.
Q:What is your measure of success for the event? A: It is necessarily impressionistic but there are
several metrics I use. Number one is what my
board call 'special moments'; where things
happen, speeches are given and meetings occur
from which you walk away from and you say, 'that
was incredible'. In the past it has been an address
for Mikhail Gorbachev about how he changed the
Soviet Union, a presentation from Bill Clinton
about how we can use IT to empower people in
developing countries or the King of Spain coming
out to say that IT is the future of Europe's
economy. It is a little intangible but you know it
when you see it. A second thing is community
building. An example of this happened at our
WITSA meeting in South Africa in September
2004. We are together for three days and
subsequently visited Johannesburg together. The
organisers arranged for us to visit Nelson
Mandela's Home and the guide on the bus asked
us where we were from. Everybody, without
exception spontaneously said; 'We are from the
world'. I think building that global relationship is
one strong indicator of success.
Q: What do hope that WCIT will improve on over
previous events? A: There are two things. First we are bringing in
more of the world each time. When I took over as
WITSA President in 1995, we had 22 members of
WITSA and the WCIT. Now we have 67 countries in
WITSA, a more than three-fold increase. Many of
these new members come from Africa and South
Asia and parts of South America and Europe, who
were not even part of the IT world several years
ago. We have to make sure they are not only part
of WITSA's organisation but make sure they
participate in the World Congress, because it
really is a great opportunity for them to be
exposed to, and make business relationships. That
is one area that we are always trying to improve,
the breadth and depth of our representations,
particularly from developing countries. The second
thing is that we are coming out more with vision of
the future of the next generation of the Internet
information technology. The cycle of innovation
seems to come in waves and we are in a bit of
down time in the past few years coming out of the
Internet bubble. It is now starting to pick up
again. Whether you are talking about E-Health,
VoIP, or Grid Computing or power to the Internet
user at the edge, I think we want to come out of
the 2006 World Congress, with more vision of
what the next generation of the Internet and
information technology will be.
WITSA on WCIT
