As a part of Synergy team of Telkom Group, sometimes we are requested to facilitate meetings between or among SOEs. This week we got involved in a meeting between the Vice CEO of BRI (Catur Budi Harto), IT Director of BRI (Arga Mahanana Nugraha), Group Business Development Director of Telkom (Honesti Basyir), and CEO of Admedika (Dwi Sulistiani) as one of the subsidiary of Telkom. BRI & Telkom are two of the greatest SOE in Indonesia with strong roles & commitments to enhance ecosystem-based national economy through transformations in technology and business: BRI as the top bank in Indonesia, and Telkom surely as the top telco in Indonesia.
Streamlining among SOEs business developments is always necessary, including technological aspects. As a commitment, BRI will cease its satellite initiatives and return instead to use Telkom satellites (or other providers in compliance to regulatory and business norms). Alignments in the use of data centres are under consideration too. National economic development programs will be managed in alignment with competencies and business. An establishment of BRI-Pegadaian-PNM holding to grow MSME and ultra-micro economy is a good example for that, as well as other holdings and strategic alliances among SOEs. Doors for cross investment could also be opened, for example in healthcare ecosystem.
Computer Science Doctorate Program of Binus University invited me to provide an Industrial Talk for their PhD-level students. I offered them a talk on the evolution of economy and technology towards the era of complexity.
The day for the lecture was December 2nd. But since I was in Bandung that day, the lecture was carried out as a zoominar. The moderator was Dr Agung Trisetyarso; and the sponsor was surely Dr Ford Lumban Gaol, the Vice Chair of Binus University Doctorate Program in Computer Science, who is also the current Chair of the IEEE Indonesia Computer Society Chapter.
I started the talk by introducing the IEEE TEMS — Technology & Engineering Management Society, i.e. an IEEE society where I am currently a member of its Regional Leadership Subcommittee. TEMS aims to drive IEEE members in maintaining essential engineering management skills, supporting the leadership career path of IEEE members, and fostering active knowledge transfer between the academic and practicing communities.
The lecture continued by exploring the digital transformation in the contexts of digital strategy, digital architecture, and its innovative business model, which inevitably drive global business into ecosystem-based collaborative business (Warner & Wäger 2019) with its platform-based value chain (Jacobides, Cennamo, Gawer 2018) and virtually-connected strategic collaborative network (Graça & Camarinha-Matos 2016). After discussing the methods in architecting business ecosystems, the lecture shifted to business ecosystem as paradigm shift (Cha 2020). I figured that it means that business ecosystems are considered as another inevitability in a more complex business environment — even for non-digital business.
Ecosystem players — i.e. business entities related to the ecosystems — may have different needs, goals, positions, and abilities. When interactions occur, members analyse, adapt, and form an evolutionary process. Adaptabilities within a business ecosystem shows that a business ecosystem is a system that has the characteristics of a complex adaptive system (CAS).
Adaptability in CAS occurs both to environmental changes and to changes in relation among players in the system (Arthur et al. 1997). Simultaneous and continuous adaptability among players in CAS will result in co-evolution (Gomes & Gubareva 2020). This co-evolution also allows changing roles in the business ecosystem. The result of this collective activity is adaptability that creates new things (emergence) with dynamic congruence.
But this is not a deep exploration on ecosystem business and CAS. Instead, this talk aims to provide some insights on the aspects of complexity, where CAS and ecosystem business are only some examples of its parts. I then restarted with a storytelling of the exploration of complexities, starting from Murray Gell-Mann, his book The Quark and The Jaguar, and the establishment of Santa Fe Institute.
The scientific method is the portmanteau of instruments, formalisms, and experimental practices that succeed in discovering basic mechanisms despite the limitations of individual intelligence. There are, however, on this planet, phenomena that are hidden in plain sight. These are the phenomena that we study as complex systems: the convoluted exhibitions of the adaptive world — from cells to societies. Examples of these complex systems include cities, economies, civilizations, the nervous system, the Internet, and ecosystems.
The nature of complexity would include the phenomena of non-linearity, dynamic interactions, adaptation, self-organisation, evolution, and emergence.
Its consequences in economy and business, is that economy is analysed not necessarily in equilibrium, its decision makers (or agents) are not superrational, the problems they face are not necessarily well-defined, and the economy is not as a perfectly humming machine but as an ever-changing ecology of beliefs, organising principles, and behaviours (Arthur 2021).
We continued from WB Arthur (2021): Complexity economics assumes that agents differ, that they have imperfect information about other agents and must, therefore, try to make sense of the situation they face. Agents explore, react and constantly change their actions and strategies in response to the outcome they mutually create. The resulting outcome may not be in equilibrium and may display patterns and emergent phenomena not visible to equilibrium analysis. The economy becomes something not given and existing but constantly forming from a developing set of actions, strategies and beliefs — something not mechanistic, static, timeless and perfect but organic, always creating itself, alive and full of messy vitality.
So my main message is that a competitive business should not avoid or overcome complexities. Instead, complexities are used or even created as a way to open new opportunities, design new capabilities, and conquering new markets.
For its implication in strategic management, I offer a view from the IEEE to use — in this era — a framework called strategic planning for exponential era (SPX). I explored this framework quite deeply. It is taken from an IEEE book authored by Espindola and Wright (2021), titled The Exponential Era: Strategies to Stay Ahead of the Curve in an Era of Chaotic Changes and Disruptive Forces.
My presentation was followed with a warm discussion with Binus’ lecturers and students on some technological and business aspects of complexity, complex adaptive system, and ecosystem-based business, including its current implementation in Telkom Indonesia. I also offered to continue the discussion using a collaborative framework of IEEE TEMS.
Since 2016 I have a new role in Telkom Indonesia as the AVP (now Project Leader) of the Industry Synergy. The role of Synergy Department is simply developing the capabilities (mainly digital capabilities) and expanding opportunities of Telkom Group by maximising the collaboration with the industry. As a government policy at that time, the collaborations are prioritised with the state-owned companies (BUMN) in Indonesia. More than three years have passed then. We have changed the Ministry of BUMN, Telkom’s CEO, Telkom’s BOD in charge of Synergy programs, SVP and VP of Synergy, etc. But we are still developing our paradigm of digital synergy, i.e. developing digitally supported economic ecosystems in different sectors.
Using a metaphor from the environment, an innovation ecosystems consists of interdependent parties with different or often competing objectives and concerns, living and growing together in a common digital space, unified using one platform or more to enable them to live better and grow faster. Co-creation, collaboration, and competition are some key activities of the innovation ecosystems.
Last year, the new Minister of BUMN has addressed Telkom Indonesia to develop five ecosystems: Tourism, Agriculture, Logistics, Education, and Healthcare. We even hired a prominent global consultant to help us design the ecosystem. But this February, I requested an approval from the uplinks to add another ecosystem: the MSME ecosystem, to support non-digital micro, small, and medium business enterprises in digital way.
Previously we have had a program called RKB to develop the capability of SMEs in Indonesia. RKBs (BUMN’s creative house) have been established in 245 of 514 cities and regencies in Indonesia. In RKB, BUMNs provide training, consulting, and other facilities to leverage the capabilities of the SMEs in three product categories: culinary, craft, and fashion. But RKBs have failed to attract the SMEs since they do not really improve the sales of the SME products. An MSME ecosystem, on the contrary, should start with MSME commercialisation in mind.
We started with a small design by utilising a multichannel marketing application called SAKOO as our first platform. In March, many cities and locations in Indonesia (and other part of the world) are locked down (until the time I’m writing this post, btw) due to COVID-19 pandemic. We found some contexts for the usecase of the platform. To generate market, we will use BUMNs (and public, using campaigns supported by BUMNs) to create demands for the MSME market. BUMNs may buy the products of the MSMEs for their need, or as an aid to support the communities or health facilities in. Surely we first tried it with Telkom. Telkom has started purchasing MSMEs products using this platform, and has also sent support to communities in Depok.
The Minister of BUMN has a new expert staff: Ms Loto S Ginting — a smart lady working previously as a Director in the Ministry of Finance, managing sovereign bond. Now she advises the Minister of BUMN in the issues of Finance and MSME development. Our BUMN Law (UU 19/2003) mentions indeed that the strategic roles of the BUMNs include providing services for public, counterweight for private business, and support to develop small business and co-operatives. We approached her to discuss this first stage of MSME Ecosystem development program. She enthusiastically accepted the program. In addition, she improve the plan to add B2B transaction facility to the first stage of the program. The transaction data from B2B and B2C are further combined with data taken from e-Procurement systems of the BUMNs to make a dashboard to ensure the increase absorption of MSMEs products and services by the BUMNs. She calls this program PADI UMKM, stands for Pasar Digital UMKM / MSME Digital Market.
Meanwhile, the Covid-19 pandemic has brought the nation into an economic crisis. To survive, MSMEs and their employees need the public involvement. The Minister addressed to rush the MSME platform development. We work with our startup partners: Anchanto, Tees, Payfast, etc to enrich PADI UMKM platform with wider multichannel, logistics management, B2B capability, financing facility, etc. We need to finish it next month (June), so we can start the transaction on July. Eight BUMNs have been selected for pilot project. A new PMO has been assigned to finish this project.
It still felt like a miracle that everything was only in ideation last February, and all activities are carried out during lockdown periods, with all meetings held using vicon, and coordination using whatsapp. Let’s hope we can finish it on June, to support more prosperous small business in Indonesia in long term, or at least, for now, just to have them survive these crises..
Alhamdulillah, we have finished APCC 2013. Just like TALE 2013 was somehow related to CYBERNETICSCOM 2012; then APCC 2013 was like a continuation of COMNETSAT 2012, when Prof. Byeong Gi Lee suggested the IEEE Comsoc Indonesia Chapter to host the APCC. This suggestion brought us to attend APCC 2012 in Jeju Island, where we won the bid to host the 2013 APCC. It was followed by a series of activities, including event organising and paper management. The IEEE Comsoc Indonesia Chapter appointed Dr. Wiseto Agung, an avid scientist an researcher from Telkom Indonesia, as the General Chair of the conference. Another strategic step taken is to arrange a partnership with ITTelkom (now the University of Telkom) as a co-organiser on both the technical issue and event organising. Originally, the number of submitted papers raised very-very slowly. A bit stressed, indeed. But a few days before the deadline, hundreds of paper came through the EDAS. From all over the world, those most educated human beings still chose to wait until the final second before submitting their papers. We collected a total of 309 papers. The Technical Program Committee was chaired by Dr Arifin Nugroho, with some vice chairs. The most active TPC vice chair was Dr. Rina Puji Astuti. Meanwhile I held the position of Chair at IEEE Indonesia Section, so I must share my resources (time etc) with many other IEEE activities. The Comsoc Chapter Chair (Satriyo Dharmanto) and the Past Chairs (Muhammad Ary Murti, Arief Hamdani) continued the struggle to succeed APCC 2013. With strict selection process, APCC 2013 passed only 163 papers (53 % of total incoming paper).
APCC, Asia – Pacific Conference on Communications, is a very prestigious regional conference in Asia Pacific, which is the region with the highest growth in the world of ICT technology. APCC is supported by the IEEE Communications Society, the KICS in Korea, the IEICE Communications Society in Japan, and the CIC in China. The names of the APCC Steering Committee members are also thrilling: the great figures who pioneered the world of ICT. APCC was first held in 1993 in Taejon, Korea. This year, the 19th APCC was held at the Bali Dynasty Resort in Kuta Beach, 29 to 31 August 2013. I had been in Bali since August 26 to attend TALE 2013. The other APCC organisers, from the IEEE Comsoc Indonesia Chapter, University of Telkom, and University of Udayana, has started preparing the event on 28 August.
Thursday, 29 August, the APCC 2013 was opened. With a lot of technical sponsors, some representatives had to deliver short speeches at that opening ceremony. But each one took only about 5 minutes. Opening speeches were delivered by Dr. Wiseto Agung (GC APCC 2013), Satriyo Dharmanto (Chair , IEEE Indonesia Comsoc Chapter), Dr. Ali Muayyadi (Telkom University representative), Prof. Zhen Yang (Chair of APCC Steering Committee; Chair of the CIC), Dr. Yoshihiro Ishikawa (Chair, IEICE Communications Society), Prof. You- Ze Cho (Vice Chair , KICS), and yours truly (Chair, IEEE Indonesia Section). IEEE Indonesia Section itself represented the IEEE as the technical activity endorser.
My speech just simply mentioned that Asia Pacific has great significance in the development of ICT. Besides the fact that this area is the center of the most competitive ICT industry, the residents are also among the most adaptive in embracing digital lifestyle in the new culture. Our cultural richness has supported the development of communication technologies, with the ability to understand and support the highly contextual interaction and communications. But the social problems in the region is also alarming. We open access to information technology, but we encourage consumerism. We facilitate the preservation of nature, but we also increase pollution. We help creating new jobs, but we also accelerate urbanisation. The engineers need to design and develop technologies that will address the various issues of humanity and the life of human being. And it was in this social context, that we chose this theme for APCC 2013: Smart Communications to Enhance the Quality of Life .
Keynote speeches were delivered successively by Prof. Byeong Gi Lee (Past President, IEEE Communications Society; Past President, KICS), Prof. Adnan Al-Anbuky (Director of Sensor Network and Smart Environment (SENSE) Research Lab, School of Engineering Auckland University of Technology, Auckland New Zealand), Mr. Indra Utoyo (CISP, Telkom Indonesia; Chairman, MIKTI), and Mr. Ichiro Inoue (Network Systems Planning & Innovation Project, NTT).
The next activities were typical for any international technical conference. Special speech sessions, tutorial sessions, parallel presentation sessions, poster sessions, etc. In the tutorial session, I chose to avoid mainstream discussions of mobile network etc, and chose instead the sensor network as one of the elements for the Internet of Things (IoT). The tutors happened to be a pair of professors from Coventry University. This is a modern university (compared to classical universities) that gained a lot of appreciation and awards everywhere this year. Another regular event was the Gala Dinner, with its semi-formal atmosphere, but also with its permission for a laugh-out-loud sessions. Here the Paper Awards were also presented by the APCC Steering Committee .
The last day, I spent my time to visit the poster sessions. Out of curiosity, I seriously talked to all presenters about the posters presented. It was a way to learn new things while expanding networks. Conversations in the poster session could be deeper and more interesting than the presentation session where time is very limited.
I recognised that it was a hard work for the organisers. In the review session on Saturday afternoon, I said that even though the organisers in any events always feel that there are a lot of unforgivable shortcomings, but the APCC Steering Committee and the participants, had personally conveyed their appreciations and positive feedbacks. Good job! The IEEE, Unitel, Udayana University, and all. Great job! This year there will be many other events of the IEEE Indonesia Section. Hopefully all will provide supports as it was for the APCC 🙂 . Thanks, all.
Q-Journal is a codename for a suite of digital journal management services, that Telkom Group will prepare and launch this quarter. Q-Journal will support academic transaction in Indonesia by providing global coverage for national journals to international index and high quality international papers to national universities.
Global Publishing Service
Q-Journal opens the opportunity to academic institutions, universities, research centres, and conference organisers, to submit their journals (transactions, academic letters, etc) and proceedings to international index. For this service, Q-Journal has arranged a strategic partnership with Summon.
Global Discovery Service
Q-Journal opens the gates to access thousand international journals for universities in Indonesia. Through our aggregators, papers might be explored and downloaded. The total expense will be significantly lower than those offered by international paper providers. So far, we have arranged partnership with Emerald, Proquest, and still open other partnership opportunities.
This evening, at last we launched the new design of TELKOMSPEEDY.COM. This is the site for Telkom’s broadband internet product.
When our new (reconfigured) Multimedia division was (re-)formed, the then EGM ad interim, Mr Widi Nugroho appointed me personally to be the PIC of the main site of Speedy products, until a definitive unit could handle that tasks. Just after a few days, I found out that the site was very complicated with unnecessary features and contents. Surely I tried to fix it. But at last I gave up, and decided to redesign the site to make it simpler, easier to operate, and more elegant. The redesigning itself was not easy. Our division is not the only stakeholder of the site. We needed to talk to at least two directorates, within which there are more units with interests to the site. I could not start the redesign before making a consensus among all stakeholders. Again, this was not easy. The consensus itself was at last accepted just last May.
The redesign would take months, but I planned it into stages. The visual redesign seen today is just the first phase. I will not expose the details here. But after the first stage, at least the site could be operated simpler, easier, with significantly less error than the previous maldesigned site.
The last weekend before my departure to Kyôto, I attended the grand launching of Telkom Group’s IPTV product. We call this new product Groovia. The name was obviously taken after the word groovy. But Telkom also planned to have a kind of product with similar success to Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Joomla, and other 2.o products (i.e. products with two consecutive letters o).
Groovia is not just the implementation of IPTV to distribute television content over the Internet. IPTV is intended as a synergy between the power of the Internet with its web interactions, with the power of broadcast television media. IPTV is regarded as the next step in developing the service platform for multimedia interactions services.
In the first year, Groovia planned to include the following services:
TV on Demand: a service to offer television content with interactivity, and with a recording facility in the network; which allows such control as the video service: pause, rewind, replay, scheduled reports, and others.
Video on Demand: non-television multimedia contents that are included in this service, including video films, music, karaoke, etc., with various forms of interaction.
Web Service: the interactivity of the cyber world that is integrated into the television system. The services consist among others the social networks, news, weather, stocks info, and others.
The next year, more services such as e-advertising, e-transaction and e-shopping are expected to be integrated into Groovia. In infrastructure layer, the integration of IPTV, SDP, and other platforms, such as store content & applications, is expected to be carried out smoothly, establishing an efficient and comfortable multimedia interaction ecosystem.
But the users will ask: ain’t it costly? The customers of Telkom Speedy with data rate 1, 2, or 3 Mb/s will need only to pay about US$ 5 more to its Speedy monthly subscription to have the Groovia service. Not too expensive for the status as a taste-maker :). Richer contents could be selected according to individual needs of every user. Unfortunately, Groovia is still in the initial deployment phase, and is available only in certain areas in Jakarta. Deployment to other Indonesia cities will begin later this year.
The current edition of E&T is again mentioning Indonesia. It is about the Palapa Ring: the fibre-optic development project for eastern part of Indonesia. Only three companies remain from the initial seven-member consortium awarded the contract to lay 11,000 km of optical-fibre cables starting at Manado through to Ternate, Ambon, Kendari and Makassar. Telkom Indonesia (NYSE:TLK) is leading by investing US$90m, while lesser companies Indosat (NYSE:IIT) and Bakrie Telecom are putting in $30m each. Four other companies pulled out from the consortium due to lack of funds: Excelcomindo Pratama, Powertek Utama, Macca System and Infokom Elektrindo.
The construction should be completed in early 2011, providing over 70,000 villages with access to telecommunications services.
The initial plan for the project, to cost a massive $1.6bn, was to have the Palapa Ring project as the backbone of a network connecting 33 provinces and 440 cities across Indonesia via an estimated 35,280km of undersea cable and 21,807km of fibre-optic cable. It was to involve the construction of seven rings connecting Sumatra, Java, Kalimantan, Nusa Tenggara, Sulawesi, Maluku and Papua, with an eighth to connect them all. But financing has been a major issue. The project was first initiated in 1997 but on a smaller scale, then shelved due to the Asian financial crisis, which crippled Indonesia.
Telecommunications penetration in Indonesia currently stands at only 21.3 per cent with fixed line a mere 5.86 per cent. Inadequate backbone infrastructure has been widely regarded as crippling the country’s telecom sector. Many parts of Indonesia currently do not have access to basic communication and those that are connected have some of the world’s highest leased line and Internet prices.
After long weeks of preparing the Indigo Awards, I flew to Singapore to attend The Annual SDP Asia Summit. The invitation was given by Andy Zain and Andreas Surya of Indonesia Mobile-Monday (id-Momo). I have a couple times talked about SDP with them; and also presented it once in FRESH forum. SDP (service delivery platform) itself is a framework to virtualise network & orchestrate services to make it easier to develop, deploy, sale, get, & use digital services. Unlike IMS, so far there is no standard of SDP. This fact somewhat makes SDP discussion interesting: it is about best practice in infocom business.
Since SDP has no standard, companies could easily make a concept of SDP 2.0 (ala Accenture or Telecom Italia) or even SDP 3.0 (HP version). Also there were some alternatives to map SDP to other infocom management concept, such as SOA, SDF, IMS, and even Web 2.0.
When describing the architecture of SDP 2.0, Telecom Italia explores the necessities for service & network abstraction & virtualisation, including reusability and interface standardisation. Scalability & modularity would include plugins capability. Sounds a bit like Accenture version (I have blogged this version in my Indonesian blog), where the objective of SDP 2.0 is to facilitate a self-service for service developer & provider in commercializing their services & contents.
But then Hewlett-Packard introduces this term: service governance framework. It encourages the use of open standard, reusability, and other issues to ensure an effective SDP implementation. Other issue delivered is the utilisation of data mining toward users profile, applications, etc, etc, to make it SDP 3.0.
In the similar spirit, Telemanagement Forum discusses the linkage to business: SOA, SDP, Web2.0, etc, mainly SDF. Great pictures, indeed. They somewhat remind me to C++ standard template library. Discussions with operators, providers, & consultant who are in progress of implementing SDP in Asia & Europe make the days richer.
I guess then I need to make a presentation to summarize them all, and present it to my colleagues this week. Hmm, maybe after the IEEE 4G session(s).
