HKIE(IT Division) Annual Conference and Dinner 2010

As an undergraduate, by no means I would be able to attend such a professional conference and gathering, not to mention that I am not even a member of The Hong Kong Institution of Engineers(HKIE). Yet, the world is full of wonders. I am lucky enough to have a peek of the event.

The story should begin with my participation of the British Computer Society(BCS) Mentorship Programme. Fortunately, I am assigned to be the mentee of Ir. Michael Leung, an active HKIE committee member. He is outstandingly sociable and is willing to develop the young. He invited me to help in this event and, more importantly, to broaden my horizon.

The event is divided into three parts, industrial visits, annual conference and annual dinner. I have participated in all three parts and will share some of my insights.

HKIE invited delegates of different professional fields from Shenzhen to join the event, where the industrial visits were explicitly prepared to enrich their visit. A few of them, especially those from the China Association For Science and Technology(中国科学技术协会), showed a strong attitude for bridging the mutual technological development between Hong Kong and Shenzhen throughout the event. They were impressive to me.

After the visit and the conference, it is getting more obvious to me that the departments of the mainland government are more unified and authoritative than those in Hong Kong. The visit of the Transport Department(TD) of HKSAR let me know that the TD only cares about the roads and traffic but not about car accidents, whereas the TDs in mainland care both. This really makes a difference on how and what to install for the road surveillance cameras.

The structural differnce of the governments is an obstacle for the information exchange and cooperation. For example, the Shenzhen government uses GPS/AGPS locations of taxis to monitor the traffic of the region. Such method is not yet quite feasible in Hong Kong as the GPS channel is owned by private company and the privacy of the car locations would need to be protected. The proposal of joint region traffic monitoring and planning would be much harder for Hong Kong to adopt than other cities in the mainland. Privacy comes at a price.

After watching the presentations from the HKSAR officials, I would suggest the government to give some publicity and language training to our civil servants, because some, but not all, looked inferior to the those from the mainland, the business sector and the academic sector. I suppose the difference comes from their attitude towards stability, instead of change for improvement.

On the contrary, the presentation from HSBC was professional and excellent. It was remarkable that the original speaker had to attend an emergency announcement and the assistant was ordered to give the presentation a night before, demostrating high adaptability. A deep and wide customer-centered service vision of HSBC was described and was impressive to me. It seems to me that they have also passed most of their values to their employees as some ideas are consistant to what I have heard from my friend who has completed a placement in HSBC. The slides were prepared by the assistant himself for his routine. He told me that the average production time for the presentation was 2 hours per slide.

It is not difficult to realize that many engineers who went to the annual dinner were partners in the field. Most of them went to gatherings of different institutions to form new connections and strengthen the old ones. The active ones would become committee and shift positions within different related institutions and it looks like the same group of people playing around the field.

The people who toasted here and there usually had high positions in the profession or their organizations. Social power brings authoritative position and it can go backward, as they are mutual. Such relation is more obvious than the high table dinner I experienced in school, as I find myself being invited to be a helper in another annual dinner. It is wise to be actively socializing in this environment.

Time will pass. Names and positions will change. We share and cooperate because we wanted to achieve more within our limited time.