[CEO Column] Government Should Help to Construct Information Data-base

In the past, it took 20 days to travel from Pusan to Seoul, but today, it is possible to make a roundtrip in a day. Ancient farmers were always short of hands, but thanks to agricultural machines, for modern farmers, it is much easier than the old days. Although modern people do much more amount of work than the past, they can enjoy a longer leisure time. If one could calculate it based on the amount of the work, it can be interpreted that modern people are living much longer than the people of old days. Thus, in industrial society, whether one could utilize machineries or not, decided his/her ability to succeed. It was the machinery that made everything possible in the industrial society.

But, it is rapidly changing from the industrial society to the informational society. We are living in an era in which everything moves with the speed of the light. In informational society, the most important thing is, of course, the information. In this world, there are a lot of information, for example, means to save money from buying products, new therapeutic measures to treat hard-to-cure diseases, and methods to make exotic goods. It has become an era in which a country’s competitiveness is decided by means of how to - secure, manage, produce, and utilize - the information. In this informational society, what makes everything possible is the information.

By using the internet, one can easily find the needed information without limitation of place or time. But, since most of information is still in the form of archives, there is still limitation for one to utilize the information he/she needs. To help more people to access the information, the widely ranged archived information has to be transferred to the form of a database. Construction of the database has to be completed to the level of enabling one to search and utilize the information, not a level in which one just scans and saves the information for future use.

The Document-Recognition-Technology enables one to input characters on a book with the speed of 500 characters per second. The technology began to be developed from early 1950s, and now, it has been applied on various machines such as the document recognizer, the wanted-cars detector, the slip recognizer, and the ID-card recognizer, etc..

Especially, the recently developed Hi-TOPS, a wide-ranging office information handling system, can input various documents such as official documents and other printed materials with the speed of 50 pages per minute. And, once saved, one can effortlessly search for certain content by typing a word included in the content. It can also fax or e-mail to many locations simultaneously. It even functions as a copier and an internet-server or a mail-server.

Since the cold-war era, a country’s role in defense and security has been reduced. Instead, a role as an information provider is growing. An ability to search and utilize the information has become a precondition for a government administrator and other leaders. A nation and its government employees must be equipped with ideas and abilities of introducing advanced technology, figuring out the pros and cons of the technology, and enlightening of people.

The government should construct a database in which the wide-range achieves are stored. It should be done as a national project. To store valuable information and make them accessible for people increases the productivity of the information. That is one of the most important prerequisites for our society to become a free and wealthy society.

It is an important for a government administrator or other leaders to let people have shorter work hours so that they can invest the extended free time for personal development.

Lee In-Dong (CEO of HIART Corporation)