Indonesia: A tiger cub learning to roar

Indonesia: A tiger cub learning to roar

Like other developing countries, Indonesia's economic growth
has brought with it unprecedented problems. Businessman Tan Bien
Kiat takes a look at this issue.

JAKARTA (JP): Indonesia is an emerging tiger -- some call it a
tiger cub. With its steady growth and well-managed economy --
Indonesia is hot on the heels of the other tigers. Consequently,
a consumer boom is occurring. Coupled with globalization and the
technology revolution, a new class of consumers is emerging, one
which is more demanding of quality consumer products, more eager
to learn and access better information.

This phenomenon has led to two paradoxes in Indonesia. The
first paradox: The same consumers who are increasingly demanding
world class products and services are the same employees in
companies (state-owned and private alike) who need to be more
efficient and productive.

Indonesian consumers have been lured by trappings of luxury
consumer products and electronics such as designer clothing and
accessories, handphones, microwave ovens, laser disc players, and
automotive. These items have become common sight in the middle
income home. They are manufactured by fiercely competitive
companies from the United States, Japan, Germany, and Korea, who
are racing to innovate the next generation of products with
better features, more reliability and better performance. To top
it all, they are priced similar to or even lower than its
previous generation.

As consumers in Indonesia, we have come to take all this for
granted. Yet how did this actually occur? These competitively-
priced and attractive consumer products have been made possible
through the process of global competition -- companies having to
strive for world class performance and to compete for survival.
Employees of these multinational world class companies have to
continually develop new ideas, work against tough deadlines,
raise their skills and productivity levels. For many of these
employees -- these are their daily challenges, just to retain
their jobs.

Yet many of the same Indonesian consumers are employees. The
government has recently called for state-owned companies to
improve their performance and competitiveness by declaring that
"state enterprises will be deregulated and privatized to compete
with private companies". Employees need to raise their
productivity and efficiency to achieve tangible results for their
companies. Private companies are not excluded, they are being
benchmarked against their public-listed competitors and have to
increasingly compete with multinational firms.

As we come to expect and enjoy these "world class products" do
we understand what it takes to produce them? Can the Indonesian
consumer reconcile his lifestyle expectations with his
performance as an employee of a company that competes with world
class companies?

The second paradox concerns the quest for information and
learning. With the advent of personal computers and the Internet,
information around the globe can now be accessed instantaneously
while it might have taken weeks or even months in the past.
Companies, educational and research institutions, knowledge
workers, researchers, and students alike find this "information
revolution" a joy. Barriers to learning are broken down,
cognitive processes are compressed, gaps between developed and
developing nations narrowed. Properly utilized and harnessed, the
Indonesian researcher and businessman can gain much ground on his
counterpart in the developed world by easily accessing knowledge,
information, know-how and contacts.

For example, a corn farmer in Lampung can now network with his
counterparts in the mid-west of America via the Internet to
exchange ideas on advanced techniques to improve corn yields,
farm productivity and disease prevention. He can also check with
commodity trading houses in Hamburg and Singapore to find out the
spot price trends and future contracts for corn.

In this way, as long as the farmer can link into the Internet
server line in Jakarta, he can gain access to information around
the globe to enhance his farm operations and improve his returns.
In the past, finding the right people to contact, language
barriers and prohibitive costs of international telephone charges
would have been the main obstacles.

Yet this powerful tool has to be controlled. ASEAN Ministers
of Information recently met in Singapore to deliberate on how to
deal with the proliferation of Internet. They are concerned about
the "dark side" of this information technology revolution, such
as pornography, offensive writings and graphics, attacks on
governments and individuals which can now be easily perpetuated
and proliferated. The ASEAN ministers are grappling with the kind
of policies that should be established to police the underworld
of cyberspace.

Governments, institutions and parents, all face this dilemma
of how to accelerate learning and networking without being
exposed to the risks of uninhibited flow of information. This is
the second paradox.

Like the other tigers, Indonesia has to deal with the two
paradoxes. They are natural and healthy signs of development. The
only difference is -- when the Indonesian tiger cub grows up, it
is going to be larger than other tigers and the paradoxes will
become more evident.

The writer is the chief operating officer of Ometraco
Corporation, Jakarta.