[ 28 May 2000 ] Infrastructure for the Internet Economy: Getting It Right The First Time
May 28, 2000[ 5 July 2000 ] CommerceNet Singapore’s Internet Payment Series: Building Business Communities
June 5, 2000The event was kicked off by the official signing of Memorandum of Understanding between CommerceNet Singapore and Temasek Polytechic. The two parties would jointly conduct e-commerce programmes for students enrolled at Temasek Polytechnic and the CommerceNet’s Institute of Electronic Commerce (IOEC). They would also jointly market the e-commerce programmes and award the Specialist Diploma in E-Commerce to the participants. The first intake of 49 students would commence the newly launched course on the 24th of July.
On the same day, our Chairman, Prof Toh See Kiat also officially launched the IOEC, a project of CNSG which has both physical and virtual entity to provide rigorous, responsive and practical course curricula for the business sector. The IOEC has plans to go online to provide a wide range of courses on e-commerce to meet various demands in the new economy. It aims to promote e-commerce education and training globally when it develops its online courses by working with both local and overseas institutions.
The two-day (29-30 May) conference involved participation from our global network, government officials, institutions of higher learning and universities. The conference proper started with our CommerceNet counterparts from China, Taiwan, Korea and Japan who updated the audience with the trend and development of e-commerce education and training in their respective country. There were followed by local regulatory body such as IDA (Infocommunication Development Authority) which described the policy issues and prospect of IT and e-commerce in Singapore. The day’s conference ended with a panel discussion chaired by Prof Toh See Kiat. Panel members included private-sector senior executives from Lotus, Hewlett-Packard and Cisco System. The discussion centres on the importance of in-house training of workers for e-commerce skills. The Ministry of Manpower also participated to shed light on the various public schemes to support retraining of staff to adapt to IT changes and e-commerce needs.
On the second day of conference, there was a parallel run of business and technology track on e-commerce. The central theme was on cyber learning infrastructure and strategies. Speakers were from varied and interesting background such as IBM, Netegrity, Anderson Consulting, just to name a few. Topics ranged from e-learning to e-business infrastructure and development tools and strategies. The day’s conference ended with a panel session to discuss the role of tertiary institutions in cyber learning. Panellists were from the National University of Singapore, Nanyang Technological University and Temasek Polytechnic.
On the whole, the launch-cum-conference was the first major public event organised by the IOEC. The conference was well attended and we are thankful to our sponsors (IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Netegrity) as well as the speakers who have been very supportive throughout the course of our preparation and running of the conference. We look forward to organising more conferences of this nature in the near future with the objectives to further promote awareness and education of e-commerce in Singapore as well as the region.