Speaker profiles

Hyuen-Suk Rhee, UN-APCICT, Korea

Hyeun-Suk Rhee has been serving as the first Director of United Nations - Asian andPacific Training Centre for Information and Communication Technology for

Development (APCICT), a regional institution of United Nations Economic and SocialCommission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP). Ms. Rhee has over 20 years of academicexperience and service in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and ICT fordevelopment (ICTD). Prior to joining APCICT, she served as a professor for the two majoruniversities in the US, Georgia Tech and University of Texas at Dallas. She also served forUnited Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), as Chief of the InformationTechnology Centre for Africa (ITCA). She received her Ph.D. from The Ohio StateUniversity where she received several awards including President’s Citation. She haspublished and made presentations in various internationally recognized journals and conferences in the ICT field. She has served as a chair for a number of national andinternational conferences.

Mr. Ashis Sanyal,

Senior Director (e-Governance, Department of IT, Government of India

Mr. Ashis Sanyal has a Master of Technology degree in Microwave Communications Engineering from Calcutta University. He started his professional career as an Engineer in Ministry of Communications through Indian Engineering Services in 1975 and worked in various capacities in the areas of radio spectrum management and related fields, terrestrial microwave and satellite communication network planning and management. During 1982-2000, he worked in the areas of Electromagnetic Interference and Compatibility and Millimeter wave Electronics.

Since the year 2001 his responsibilities in the Department of Information Technology are in the areas of implementation of e-Governance Projects related to various social and economic sectors in various States of India. He is responsible for drafting Govt. Policy Guidelines, Strategy and Framework for Core e-Governance Infrastructure related to e-Governance Services. He is the Mission Leader of the 850 million USD Core e-Gov Infrastructure Project of State Wide Area Networks involving 29 States and 6 Union Territories and also the alternate Mission Leader for the 1.4 billion USD project of establishing 100,000 Common Services Centres in the rural India, under the National e-Governance Plan of the Government of India.

Mr. Sanyal published more than 45 technical papers in various areas of Electronics, Communication Engineering, System Design and e-Governance activities in National & International journals; participated in International Conferences and Workshops in UK, USA, Germany, Poland, Cameroon, South Korea, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Peoples Republic of China, Italy, Malaysia, Switzerland, Ethiopia and Singapore. He was a recipient of UNDP Fellowship at National Institute of Standardization & Technology, Boulder (USA) in 1991 and also undergone Chief Information Officer Training in e-Governance in Korea in July 2003.

Jon Maddog Hall

Jon "maddog" Hall is the Executive Director of Linux International
(www.li.org), an association of computer users who wish to support and promote the Linux Operating System. During his career in commercial computing which started in 1969, Mr. Hall has been a programmer, systems designer, systems administrator, product manager, technical.

 He has worked for such companies as Western Electric Corporation, Aetna Life and Casualty, Bell Laboratories, Digital Equipment Corporation, VA Linux Systems, and SGI. He currently works as an independent consultant, and is the CTO and Ambassador for Koolu (www.koolu.com) a Canadian firm that is involved with bringing environmentally-friendly computing to emerging marketplaces.

Mr Hall has worked on many systems, both proprietary and open, having concentrated on Unix systems since 1980 and Linux systems since 1994, when he first met Linus Torvalds and correctly recognized the commercial importance of Linux and Free and Open Source Software.

He has taught at Hartford State Technical College, Merrimack College and Daniel Webster College. He still likes talking to students.
Mr. Hall is the author of numerous magazine and newspaper articles, many presentations and one book, "Linux for Dummies" Mr. Hall has consulted with the governments of China, Malaysia and Brazil as well as the United Nations and many local and state governments on the use of Free and Open Source Software.

Mr. Hall serves on the boards of several companies, and several non-profit organizations.

Mr. Hall has traveled the world speaking on the benefits of Open Source Software, and received his BSc in Commerce and Engineering from Drexel University, and his MSCS from RPI in Troy, New York.

Nnenna Nwakanma holds a triple Bachelor (in the Social Sciences, History and Religion) and a Masters degree in International Law and Relations. She has worked within International development organisations and institutions in Africa as an Information, Documentation and Relations Officer: The Home Health Education Service, The Helen Keller Foundation (http://www.hki.org) and The African Development Bank(http://www.afdb.org). Co-founder of different pan-African organizations: The Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa (FOSSFA)( http://www.fossfa.net), The Africa Network of Information Society Actors (ANISA), and the Africa Civil Society for the Information Society (ACSIS). One of the major Civil Society Actors in the World Summit on the Information Society advises on the Africa Information Society Initiative.(www.uneca.org/aisi)

She is also the Co-author of

Our Side of the Divide.
http://www.schoolnetafrica.net/index.php?id=1022
http://www.thepublicvoice.org/events/capetown04/ourside.pdf

At present she works as a Consultant to governments, Civil Society organizations, business entities and International Development Organizations on various domains of her expertise in African Development: Human Rights, Conflict Management, Gender Mainstreaming and Information and Communication Technologies (ICT).

 Source of the text: www.dsf-fsn.org/en/documents/bio/Nnenna_Nwakanma_en.pdf

IBRAHIM KUSHCHU

Prof. Kushchu is an expert on management systems and artificial intelligence. Combining his management studies and his expertise in artificial intelligence, Prof. Kushchu has been working for business schools both in the UK and in Japan and teaching various information communication technology courses especially related to electronic business and mobile business. Prof. Kushchu is an internationally recognised and pioneering researcher in developing the mobile government field by bringing into the light the issues related to the use of mobile technologies in electronic government. He has edited and co-edited three books and has a number of publications in various international journals and in the proceedings of reputable conferences. He is also very active in international community of researchers through speaking, organizing, chairing, co-chairing various international conferences, and serving in the committees. He also worked with various multi-national companies including CISCO, NOKIA, and NTT DoCoMo at projects involving educational events, research, and consultancy. Prof. Kushchu holds a first degree (BSc) in management and an MBA. He also has a Master's degree (MSc) in artificial intelligence from the University of Edinburgh, UK. He was awarded a PhD degree in evolutionary artificial intelligence from the University of Sussex, UK.

Dr. Hanna is an author, international development strategist and thought leader with extensive experience in advising countries and aid agencies on designing and implementing programs to leverage information and communication technology in support of competitiveness, private sector development, and public sector reform. He has extensive experience with issues of leadership development in the public and private sectors in developing countries. He worked with stakeholders cutting across public, private and civil society leadership. He has more than 35 years of experience at the highest levels of development policy strategy, and operations, and covering all geographic regions. He was the World Bank’s first senior advisor on e-strategies.

Currently, Dr. Hanna advises countries on developing policies, institutions and leadership capabilities for coordinating ICT for development programs and social inclusion. He advises the World Bank, international organizations and premier consulting firms on issues ranging from creating networks and strategies for government transformation, to designing country and corporate programs for ICT-enabled innovation and transformation.  He is an executive coach for chief information officers. 

While a senior staff of the World Bank, he established and led global forums on developing e-leadership, transforming government and business, and building the information society. He published extensively on development strategy, development effectiveness, knowledge economy, ICT institutions, innovation systems, knowledge management, strategic planning, state modernization, and executive development. He established and chaired the World Bank’s global community of practice on e-development.  He pioneered e-Sri Lanka, the first World Bank lending operation in support of comprehensive ICT-enabled development. He also helped formulate India’s first software services export strategy.

Dr. Hanna holds Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, Wharton; and executive development from Harvard Business School. He is also currently Senior Fellow at JMB Academy of Leadership, University of Maryland, Visiting Professor at Duke University; Professor of Innovation and ICT at Infotec, Mexico, and member of the International Advisory Panel on Accreditation of Masters Programs for CIOs.

He can be contacted at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Madhav R Ragam

With over 20 years of experience working with government, utilities and healthcare clients from around the world, Madhav currently leads IBM’s industry sales in Asia Pacific in the Public Sector. He and his team work across Government, Healthcare & Life Sciences and Education industries in Growth Market countries – which include Asia, Latin America, Africa and Eastern Europe countries.

Most recently, as Director, Healthcare & Life Sciences, Madhav had responsibility for IBM’s Asia Pacific Healthcare & Life Sciences strategy, solutions, strategic alliances, and IBM’s wide breadth of product / services offerings.  

Since joining IBM in 1993 – Madhav has held a variety of solutions and sales management positions with a good exposure and successful track record of working with public sector clients – starting with Singapore, ASEAN, Asia Pacific and now the Growth Market countries.

Customs, Borders and Revenue Management areas in Government, Transformation of hospitals and making them interoperable in Healthcare and Enabling student success and learning skills in Education are some of Madhav’s favourite areas – even though he has a broad experience of working with diverse clients across the three industries in Public Sector.

Mr. Dao Dinh Kha

Mr. Dao Dinh Kha received the B.S. degree of excellence in applied mathematics from Chisinau State University (former Soviet Union) in 1987. From 1987 to 1998, he was with Institute of Information Technology and the office of the Steering Committee for the National programme on IT of Vietnam (IT2000). He received the M.E. and Dr. Eng. degrees in Information Science from Nara Institute of Science and Technology (Japan) in 2001 and 2004, respectively. His research focused on XML data querying. From April 2004 to March 2005, he was with Information Technology Center of Nagoya University (Japan) as a post-doctoral fellow in the Intelligent Media Integration (IMI) for Social Information Infrastructure project of a COE program. He has published a number of referred papers in international conferences and journals in data engineering and XML database.

He joined Directorate for IT Applications Promotion, Ministry of Post and Telematics (currently Ministry of Information and Communications) in August 2005 as a deputy director of Division of Information resources development. In June 2008, he was appointed as the Director of the National Center of Digital Signature Authentication that operates the root certification authority of the PKI branch for public use and performs a various activities in PKI management in Viet Nam. His current professional interests include the technical and legal aspects of PKI implementation, digital signature application models, electronic authentication models, as well as large database planning and government information management. On these topics, he has been involved in a number of large IT infrastructure projects and has presented in APKI-C 1^st International Symposium on PKI Application and Development, Vietnam’s IDG e-government conference 2007, Singapore’s Government Information Forum 2008 and Vietnam’s IDG information security conference 2009.

Dr. Yonathan Mizrachi, Israel

ICT for Development Specialist and e-Government officer for Foris Telecom

Dr. Yonathan Mizrachi (Harvard Ph.D. 1992 in Anthropology) is a senior advisor on national strategy development for e-Readiness (e-Governance including G2C, G2B, G2G) and Digital Divide related issues for of the Israeli Ministry of Finance, the Israeli National Committee on ICT (www.e-committee.gov.il), and the government of Haiti (during 2008). In addition, Dr. Mizrachi currently serves as the Digital inclusion and E-Government officer at Foris Telecom (www.foristel.com), an International WiMAX carrier operating in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean region and CIS countries.  He is also a senior e-Government Strategy, Processes & Architecture specialist at Netwise, Israel.

Dr. Mizrachi's past activities have included consulting the Israeli Defense Forces on Knowledge Management issues and serving as the CIO of the Mandel Leadership Institute in Jerusalem (www.mli.org.il). His academic work is performed under the umbrella term "Anthropology of the Information Age" and includes the study of effective Information Systems deployment strategies, Information Overload, and TRIZ Innovation in relation to IT, BPM and Knowledge Management. His academic work is combined with real-life applied Digital Strategy planning and implementation activities in the private and public sectors, including government, military, non-profit and business arenas since 1994 (see www.digitalyoni.com – Hebrew - for more information). Currently, Dr. Mizrachi is a senior research fellow at the BRM institute for Technology and Society at Tel Aviv University and a lecturer of Applied Anthropology at the Jesrael Valley Academic College, Israel. His recent applied research at the BRM institute is focused on the development of a national roadmap scheme for effective Local e-Government implementation and deployment in Israel.

Born in India in 1956 and studied Science and Humanities. Started career by joining Civil Services and becoming a member of the Indian Revenue Services in 1983. The Central Board of Direct taxes (CBDT), Government of India, in the late nineties, conceptualised the programme of Comprehensive Computerisation of the Income tax Department of India and entrusted on him the responsibility as Project - in - Charge (from 1999-2007) for implementing the programme to induct ICT in 750 Direct Taxes offices in India covering nearly 45000 employees and to provide Taxpayer Services in electronic form. As a part of his responsibility he set up an unique MPLS IP - VPN stat-of-the- art 15000 nodes All India Income Tax Network called TAXNET for providing dedicated fibre optic connectivity to 750 offices. He was instrumental in designing of the migration solution for legacy application running in 36 centres on client server mode to three tier mode on a single National Database . He also transformed the withholding tax regime and collection and accounting of Direct Taxes by setting up end to end processes of “ Computerisation of TDS functions” and “On line Tax Accounting System ( OLTAS)” in the Income - tax Department. His efforts in successful implementation of the project resulted in improving the Taxpayer services and increased level of voluntary compliance. His contribution in the project has been recognised and appreciated by Government of India. Currently (since 2007) he is responsible for Programme Management of National e- Governance Plan (NeGP) of India. He is looking after programme management and evaluation of 27 large and complex Mission Mode Projects identified by the Government of India for delivering citizen centric services. He has experience of designing large and complex IT projects in public private partnership mode in government domain, outsourcing of non core governmental functions and rich experience of public procurement in Information technology domain. He also has experience in government procurement, policies, financial rules and processes, business rules, government tendering and contract finalisation. He has also worked in the finance, and marketing field in the Oil Industry (1991-1995) and has varied experience in administrating Direct taxes law.

is currently working in the Directorate for IT Applications Promotion (DIAP), MIC, where he serves as Deputy Head of Information Systems Division. His responsibility covers the investigation and development of policies, models, frameworks, architectures and standards for IT application in government agencies. Dr. Ho Sy Loi received his B.Sc. degree in Computer Science from the Vietnam National University, Hanoi in 2000 and Ph.D. degree in Computer Engineering from the Nanyang Technology University, Singapore in 2005. Prior to DIAP, he was a research fellow at the School of Computer Engineering, NTU.

Dharmarajan Krishnan

Dharmarajan Krishnan has been working for the past 21 years in the areas of IT, e-governance, telecom and finance. Krishnan has experience in conceptualization and execution of nation-wide e-governance projects in varied roles that involved systems design, project management, procurement, public private partnerships, strategy and policy formulation.

Krishnan is currently working as Principal Consultant and Advisor for India’s National e-Governance Plan. Over the past three years he has been responsible for Programme Implementation and Monitoring of Mission Mode Projects, Strategic Planning, Project Appraisals, Capacity Building, mobile governance, institutional restructuring and multilateral funding for large e-governance programmes. Krishnan graduated with Distinction in Computer Science and Engineering from Anna University and topped a postgraduate program in management from the Indian Institute of Management. He is recipient of the President of India’s Award for Specially Distinguished Service in the year 2006.

Abhishek Singh

Director, E Governance, Government of India

Abhishek Singh is a B.Tech and M. Tech from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. He joined the prestigious Indian Civil Service – IAS, in 1995, and has worked in the State Governments of Nagaland and Uttar Pradesh in various capacities before joining Government of India. He has worked in close coordination with Ministers, Chief Minister and Governor of the State for policy formulation and implementation. He also has the field experience of implementing Developmental and Welfare programmes at District level and has closely monitored functioning of Local self Governments right up to Village level with special emphasis on poverty Alleviation Programmes and delivery of Educational and Health services. E Governance and use of ICT tools for simplifying Government procedures and processes is his area of expertise and he has conceptualized and implemented several projects in this regard.

In his career he has had significant achievements that include his association with Lokvani E Governance project in Hardoi that was awarded the Stockholm Challenge Award in 2006, with E Modop Project in Mokokchung that was awarded Dataquest National E Governance Champion Award in 2007 and with Communitisation Programme in Mokokchung that was awarded United Nations Public Service Award in 2008.

He has been trained at LBS National Academy of Administration, Mussorie, National Institute of Smart Government, Hyderabad, IIM Ahmedabad, Maxwell School of Public Policy, Syracuse University, USA KDI School of Public Policy, Seoul, and Nangyang Technological University, Singapore.

As Director, E Governance, Government of India, he is directly associated with policy formulation and implementation of the $ 8 billion National E Governance Plan. He is the Mission Leader for the project for establishing 100,000 Common Services Centers across India as also for E District project which aims at electronic delivery of high volume citizen services.

Jake E. Jennings

International External and Regulatory Affairs, AT&T

Jake Jennings is Executive Director of International External and Regulatory Affairs in Washington DC, where he advances AT&T’s International market entry regulatory strategy and public polices, with an emphasis on Trade promotion, the Asia Pacific region, and Internet Policy. Jake works closely with AT&T’s diverse business units, and the team of international external and regulatory affairs advocates around the world. AT&T provides wholesale services to over 220 countries and territories, and provides enterprise services to over 130 countries.

In addition to obtaining government approvals to allow AT&T to operate in a jurisdiction, other responsibilities include efforts towards market liberalization, pro-competitive licensing procedures, reasonable com0pliance requirements, and polices to promote a secure and stable internet. Mr. Jennings is based in AT&T’s Washington D.C. office.

Prior to joining AT&T in 2008, Mr. Jennings had been an Associate Bureau Chief for the Federal Communications Commission focused on domestic and international broadband and internet policies. In that capacity, he provided support and analysis of issues affecting the communications industry to the Chairman of the FCC, including Rural Health Care Telemedicine, Universal Service, and Competition Policy. He also represented the FCC before international organizations, (i.e., Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and International Telecommunications Union) on various issues, including broadband deployment, network management, and universal service.

Before then he worked for a competitive local exchange company as Vice President, Regulatory Affairs, the Federal Communications Commission, and the Illinois Commerce Commission. He has a graduate degree in Economics from the University of Central Oklahoma.