Reimagining the Digital Era

INSIDE THIS ISSUE
1st Edition, 2021

e-Newsletter

MESSAGE

Reimagining the Digital Era

FROM ASOCIO CHAIRMANDAVID WONG

Welcome to the first issue of the ASOCIO newsletter in 2021.
What a year 2020 has been. The bleak scenario that enveloped the region and theworld left an indelible mark on all of us. Waves of Covid-19 surges have forced
many governments to institute lockdowns on the population impacting economic
and social activities. While some countries have weathered the storm well, others
had to grapple with the pandemic that caused unprecedented hardship.
Much can be learned from the pandemic and our response to it. ASOCIO
published a regional report on the ASIA AFTER COVID- Driving Digital in
Response to the Global Pandemic in December 2020 outlining some of theresponses and intervention by economies in the region that had stood them wellin this crisis.
The storm clouds are passing and we can lookforward to a clear path to recovery with vaccine rollout
in high gear across the globe. Among the first off
the block is the technology sector. As one of theindustries that had a relatively easier time during thepandemic, the recovery phase resulted in highdemand for technology products and services.
Starting with the upstream shortages of chips andsemiconductor components that are the essentialbuilding blocks to downstream retail demand forfinished goods, the pandemic has fueled the demand
for technology. Work from Home (WFH), online
learning, e-commerce, virtual meetings and events
are all the accelerated results of the pandemic.
The transformation taking place would not stop with thepandemic but rather the velocity of change will only
increase as we adapt to the new normal and transformthe way we do business. We are at the forefront of thedigital transformation.

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As ASOCIO, we are well position to grasp the opportunities that this change isbringing. Allow me to highlight some of the programs to take your business to ahigher plane.
ASOCIO Meet & Greet is a new program designed to help your business grow. The
Meet & Greet sessions will enable you to leverage on the regional strength ofASOCIO and seek connections in new markets. It is a platform to introduce yourbusiness to potential partners in the ASOCIO network.
The webinars would also continue with renewed vigor. A team has been out
in place to drive the rollout of the webinars that would pique the interest andbeneficial to our regional audience.
Our Policy Task Force and the New Normal Expert Working Group (NNEWG)
have been busy at work to identify policy considerations by governments andmultilateral organizations as we enter the recovery phase.
ASOCIO as a network is as strong as the ties that bind us. This year, we lookforward to strengthening our ties and building new bonds through in-person
events. After one year hiatus of physical events, Bangladesh will host our annual
ASOCIO Digital Summit in Dhaka, Bangladesh on 11-14 November 2021 andVietnam to host the Smart City Summit at Binh Duong, Vietnam on 11-13 October2021.
As borders open, we look forward to rekindling our friendship and meet again
soon at our flagship events. We will be keeping a close watch on the situation andwill be updating you on the latest plans for ASOCIO as they unfold.
Wishing you all the success.
Thank you.
David Wong
Asocio Chairman

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Reimagining the Digital Era

MEEET & GREET

ASOCIO is having its inaugural Meet & Greet session where it allows its members
to meet potential partners in the Asian-Oceanic region. This session will be held
on a bi-monthly basis on specific topic of interest and specific industry focuseg. Fintech, eCommerce, Cross Border Business, Cybersecurity etc.
ASOCIO is having its inaugural Meet & Greet session where it allows its members
to meet potential partners in the Asian-Oceanic region. This session will be held
on a bi-monthly basis on specific topic of interest and specific industry focus
eg. Fintech, eCommerce, Cross Border Business, Cybersecurity etc.
The Meet & Greet Platform will debut as follows:

TUESDAY 1:00PM(UTC- +08.00
2.30PMKL time)
20 APRIL 2021

Topic & Industry Focus:

Cross Border E-Commerce & Fulfillment
Who to Attend:(i) Associations – Member Economies(ii) Providers(iii) Enablers(iv) Marketplaces(v) Merchants/e-Tailers

How it Works:
 Interested participants to register with Secretariat
 All participants to do a 2-mins pre-recorded introduction and submit toSecretariat on or before deadline
 The respective participant should be present during the Meet & Greet toattend to any Q&A
 ASOCIO will link the interested companies together
Feel free to contact the Secretariat secretariat@asocio.org for more information
or clarifications.

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R
Reimagining
eimagining the Digital Era
ETHE RISK OF
WORK FROM HOME
(WFH)
BY PHIL CAPTAIN

In a time of social distancing and remote work, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomonraised a surprising topic during his latest earnings call with Wall Street analysts:
togetherness. "Our firm has always had a team-oriented apprenticeship culture, andwe benefit from being and working together," he explained. While many CEOs seem inno hurry to refill their office buildings, and several have told employees they need neverreturn to the office, Solomon made it clear that he wants his colleagues back in theoffice as soon as is safely possible. He himself has never stopped going to the officethrough the pandemic.

Fortune August/ September 2020
Solomon's desire to bring his employees back together physically even as the coronavirus continues to rage around the globe, particularly in the U.S., isn't rooted in any simple calculation ofefficiency. Facebook, Fujitsu, Nationwide, Otis, Siemens, Twitter, and other major companies haveannounced that large portions of their workforces may or must work remotely from now on. It
saves money and may increase productivity, managers say. Many employees prefer it. A recent
survey by Korn Ferry found that 64% of workers feel that they're more productive at home.
But a group of hyper-successful contrarians—Apple, Amazon, Goldman, Google, and others,
have pointedly not offered the indefinite WFH option. They want employees back physically
together. Considerable evidence supports their stance. It also shows that when employers offer
indefinite WFH, they're messing with something more powerful than they may realize.
Allowing or requiring employees to leave the workplace was clearly the right thing to do when thepandemic arrived, and for many companies it will remain the right thing for some time to protect
the health of their people. Google, acknowledging the likely timing of vaccine development anddistribution, recently extended its voluntary WFH policy until July 2021. Some closings areimperative for public health. But employers who have a choice should keep in mind that thecosts of WFH are high and may not be obvious. The stiffest penalty may be lost creativity andinnovation. Every company is desperate for good ideas in this environment, and it would be hardto design a worse policy for finding them than unnecessarily requiring or encouraging employees
to stay apart.
7 /ASOCIO E-NEWSLETTER I 2021FACE-TO-FACE MATTERS
In one of the most revealing studies of creativity in the workplace to date, researchers from MIT,
Northeastern University, University of Cologne, University of Bamberg, and Aalto University
studied several teams working on projects involving computer science, economics, psychology,and other fields; their findings were published in the International Journal of Organisational
Design and Engineering in 2012.
The subjects wore small badges called sociometers to record interactions within the teams, andthe creativity and quality of the teams' ideas were rated by peers on a scale of one to five. The
results show strikingly what a deeply human experience it is to be creative in a group. The morethat group members faced each other, the more creative was their output. The more theylooked into each other's eyes, the more creative they were. The more willing they were toconfide in one another, the more creative they were.
Facing each Other, looking into the eyes, confiding—all those behaviors reflect and build trust.
The researchers measured trust within the groups and found that it was crucial to the wholeprocess. Their conclusion: "There is no substitute for face-to-face interaction to build up thistrust."Those high-achieving contrarian employers have understood all this for years. For example,
Google's free top-quality cafeteria meals aren't merely a perk. They’re a way to bring together
employees who might otherwise never see each other, and to make them wait in lines, where
they'll talk. Long, narrow cafeteria tables increase the odds of sitting next to or across from—andthus talking with—strangers. Such chance interactions are where successful innovations oftenoriginate. Gmail, Google News, and Street View came from engineers chatting at lunch.
Apple's Steve Jobs obsessed over face-to-face meetings. There's a temptation in our networked
age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat," he told WalterIsaacson, authorof a best selling Jobs biography. “That’s crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings,
from random discussions." When asked by Fortune to recount the birth of the iPhone, Jobs said
the earliest ideas arose from informal gabbing: "We all had cell phones. We just hated them,
they were so awful to use." That "watercooler talk" is the "one part of the iPhone mythology thateveryone tends to agree on," author Brian Merchant reports in his book ‘The One Device’.

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MISSING SPARKS
But with today's technology, does optimal interaction really have to be in person? Won't a Zoom
meeting work almost as well? No, it won't. We are hardwired from our development as humans
to value the physical presence of others. It's deeper than most of us think.
Consider something we're not supposed to do now: shaking hands. Job applicants who shakehands get rated more highly by evaluators than those who don't, even when everything else about
them is the same. We judge people who shake hands to be more trustworthy and more competentthan those who don't. Shaking hands is literally an electric experience: Brain imaging showsthat we energize the region associated with reward sensitivity—that is, we feel rewarded—by shaking hands, or merely by seeing other people shake.
There is a similar physical response when we converse with someone face-to-face. The pupilsof our eyes constrict and dilate in parallel with the other person's. Neither of us is aware it'shappening, but it builds trust. When we’re physically together, we unconsciously mimic one
another's posture, gestures, and tone of voice, which builds trust and empathy.
Video is far inferior. Posture and gestures are partly or entirely invisible. People never look eachother in the eye; they can't look directly into the screen and the camera simultaneously. In video
meetings, you can't turn from one person to face another; everyone is facing the camera.
Natural conversational responding, turn-taking, and interrupting become maddeninglyawkward.

HIDDEN COSTS
Togetherness is in our deepest nature. "Natural selection mandated us to be in groups in orderto survive," Michael S. Gazzaniga, a leading researcher in cognitive neuroscience, has written.
Reached recently at his home—his office at the University of California at Santa Barbara isclosed—he's feeling the loss Of physical presence with others. "In the academic world I get asense that the excitement and enthusiasm one can gln up on an intellectual question is harder tosustain," he says. "It's humanity influencing the rational thing, and it gets lost on Zoom." Much ofthe most revealing work on team performance in the past decade has been conducted by MIT's
Alex Pentland, who developed the sociometer badges mentioned earlier. Asked what's being lostas millions of workers remain at home, he says: The feeling of connection and being a memberof a team, and all the incidental conversations and nonlinguistic cues that get people on thesame page and aligned, as well as the serendipity that is the source of most innovation."
His outlook for organizations and their people: "Completely standardized tasks work well. You canrely on existing social ties to align people for a while. But that is expiring about end ofsummer.”Companies adopting large-scale indefinite work-from-home policies will certainly save somemoney—an important consideration now—and they may get along just fine for quite a while.
The downside will accumulate only slowly and will be harder to appreciate fully. What thesecompanies gain can be quantified much more easily than what they lose. But while they may
take time to show up on the P&L, the losses could be much greater.

Phil Captain is a passionate Business Leadership Coach for many
CEOs and Executives of startups and large corporations worldwide.
He is driven by a simple phrase: “Facts TELL, Stories SELL”. Hisability to dig out the facts, with a simple and direct approach, has
facilitated many leaders to take their companies to Greater Heights.

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FUTURE PLANS &PAPERS FROM MEMBER ECONOMIES
Singapore - SGTech
ADVOCACY PAPERS PUBLISHED
Multi-layered approach needed to address theenergy needs of data centres.

Date
18 May 2021
EventInfocomm Leaders Golf 2021
Register sponsorship@sgtech.org.sg

Continued Cyber Security Preparedness a Critical
Success Factor to Singapore’s Digital Hub Status.
Three-Pronged Approach to Boost Singapore’s
Smart Nation Journey.
Understanding of AI’s Benefits and Consideration of
AI Ethics and Governance are Keys to Broadening AI
and High Performance Computing Adoption inSingapore.
Company Culture, Clear Business Objectives andthe Right Resources are Key Factors for Successful
Digital Transformation.

INDUSTRY RESEARCH PUBLISHED
SMEs towards Cyber Security (Q4 2020)
A research report that looks at uncovering SME
management/ owners' thinking and mindsets
towards cyber security.
Singapore Blockchain Ecosystem Report 2020
(Dec 2020)
The report is co-presented by OpenNodes, Temasek,IBM, PwC Singapore, EY, and SGTech, and supportedby the Infocomm Media Development Authority,and the Monetary Authority of Singapore. It
highlights Singapore’s lively blockchain researchlandscape due to active contributions from bothacademic institutions and the private sector.

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MyanmarMoving Forward to Myanmar 4.0
The government of Myanmar is committed to devote
its newly-elected government to strengthen anduplift the economic, administrative, education andhealth sectors in order to bring development ofthe nation. Our “Myanmar Computer Industry
Association” established under the leadership andguidance of “Myanmar Computer Federation”
is also striving its best to boost the national
development through Information and Communication
Technology. The nation itself is aspired to revitalize
the national economy based on Myanmar 4.0 andfacilitate the growth of Myanmar 4.0 in othersectors. Therefore, we as MCIA are implementing
Myanmar 4.0 in collaboration with otherassociations’ members as to align our works with
the national policy of Myanmar 4.0.

We are magnifying our efforts to provide technicalassistance to other associations. We have recentlysucceeded in signing the “Memorandum ofUnderstanding” together with Myanmar Technologies
and Investment Corporation, and “Myanmar Fruit,Flower and Vegetable Producer and Exporter
Association”. As to demonstrate our steadfast
support for the achievement of Agriculture 4.0,
we would be rendering technical assistance toMyanmar Fruit, Flower and Vegetable Producer andExporter Association. We have initially conducted athree-week webinar on Saturdays to share theknowledge of agriculture integrating technology.
Moreover, we have bridged them with “MyanmarTechnologies and Investment Corporation” for theirsustainable cooperation.

The government of the Union of Myanmar is aimingto develop Digital Economy through four pillars,
fourteen objectives of Sustainable Development,
nine prioritized sectors, thirty-two short term plans
and sixteen long-term plans. As the national
government has recently signed “Regional
Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), theMinistry of Investment and Foreign Economic
Relations and SMEs are leading working groupmeetings in collaboration with Union of Myanmar
Federation of Chambers of Commerce & Industry(UMFCCI), we are consistently taking part in thesemeetings.
Everyone witnesses the huge impact of the “blackswan” of our era which is the global pandemic of
Covid-19 and suffers from the repercussions of it interms of deteriorating health, economic and social
sectors by majority of the countries in the world.
Even though Myanmar had barely known about theunpleasant potency of the pandemic during its firstwave, the pandemic wreaked havoc the economic
capital of the nation “Yangon” in the second wave
as well as another important city of Myanmar“Mandalay” has suffered from its unpleasantpotency. There had not been much demonstrated
damages due to the pandemic in other parts of thenation and the administrative capital “Naypyidaw”.
Since Yangon was primarily hit severely, it could
create a ripple effect in dilapidating the national
economy, Multi-National Corporations, SMEs andtraditional businesses. As to revert the economy
and to safeguard the sustainable growth of SMEs,
the national government set a loan scheme forthem. The loan scheme is one of the seven core
objectives of the government’s Covid-19 Economic
Relief Plan (CERP).
These seven objectives are:
• Improve Macroeconomic Environment throughMonetary Stimulus• Ease the Impact on the Private Sector throughImprovements to Investment, Trade &Banking Sectors• Easing the Impact on Labourers & Workers• Easing the Impact on Households• Promoting Innovative Products & Platforms• Healthcare Systems Strengthening• Increase Access to COVID-19 Response Financing(Including Contingency Funds)
Additionally,thenational’sE-Commerce,
M-Commerce are being utilized much greatly by thepeople which stimulates the speedy growth of thesectors so that the national government is working
its best to mandate E-Commerce Strategy Policy as
quickly as possible. We as “MCIA” are dedicating our11 /ASOCIO E-NEWSLETTER I 2021

Kickoff Activities of MCIA in Myanmar 4.0
best efforts and technical support to facilitate thepolicies development process of the nationalgovernment.
To conclude, the Republic of the Union of Myanmar
is moving forward to implement Industry 4.0,
therefore,transformingitsadministrative
mechanism in digitalizing them. The nation is not
only abundant in natural resources, a large pool ofits human capital especially younger generations
are more eager to learn IT related subjects and seekfor employment opportunities in technology
sectors. The recent event of M2 Mobile Legends:
Bang Bang World Championship 2021 held in thelast week of January where a gamer from Myanmar
won the First Runner-Up Award can positively alter
the landscape of Myanmar eSports sector andreinvigorate Myanmar Game Industry Development.
I would like to concede this article by reassuringthat the government of Myanmar would reinforce
the development of its administrative, economic,education, health, agriculture, industrial and othersectors by leveraging Myanmar 4.0.

MoU between MCIA and other association
According to Myanmar 4.0, we have recently
succeeded in signing the “Memorandum ofUnderstanding”
together
withMyanmar
Technologies and Investment Corporation, and“Myanmar Fruit, Flower and Vegetable Producer
and Exporter Association” to become agriculture
4.0. In 2021, we will sign the MoU between MCIA
and other associations to advocate theirtechnological needs.

To collaborate with ministry of health with saw
saw Shar (Early Finding) App
During the Pandemic, MCF
developed Saw Saw Shar App
that can be present the statusof patients who suffered theCovid-19. The app also can bedisplay the traces of victims
and the viewer can avoid theplaces where the patients
have been. We will morecollaborate with MoH with this
App in 2021. This app also won
the award from WITSAGLOBAL ICT EXCELLENCE
AWARDS 2020.
5th e-Government Conference & ICT Exhibition
The 5th e-Government Conference & ICT Exhibition
will be held at Myanmar International Convention
Center II, Naypyidaw in 2021. The date is notconfirming yet because of the pandemic.

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PCs donating event to social welfare organization
The Yangon Region Computer Industry Association(YRCIA) was donated 10 Laptop PCs to We Love Yangonorganization which is social and voluntary organizationand helping the citizens during pandemic. The aim ofdonation is to effective and efficient the daily
operations in their organization. We will make more
donation event in 2021.

Celebrating members’ funfair 2021
We will celebrate the members’ funfair on the MCIA
members’ day in 2021 and this is the annual gathering
event for MCIA members.

Myanmar 4.0 related technical webinar series to other associations
According to Myanmar 4.0, MCIA will support technical webinar series to other Non-IT associations in 2021.

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PROPOSEDEVENTS IN 2021
ASOCIO
SMART CITY SUMMIT 2021
Binh Duong, Vietnam
October 11 -13, 2021

ASOCIODIGITAL SUMMIT 2021
Dhaka, Bangladesh
November 11 -14, 2021

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Reimagining the Digital Era
ASOCIO: Asian-Oceanian Computing Industry Organization
Website: https://www.asocio.org
Email: enquiry@asocio.org
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