Chapter 22: Cutting Apron Strings and Getting Wired for New Technology

Meanwhile, changes were taking place in the way government conducted its own public relations. Departmental heads were given greater autonomy to determine their individual PR needs and to either expand their PR units or, as happened in some cases, develop entirely new ones. And ISD hard pressed to staff the rapidly increasing new posts that resulted.

The '80s were proving a testing time for a 'mother ship' in danger of losing communication with its flotilla of offshoots out there, in the wild blue yonder, doing their own thing. Those 'client' departments that had nurtured the belief ISD was too monolithic in its approach to what could and could not, should and should not, would and would not be publicly said, were revelling in their independence. Others, uncertain as to whether they needed any, and unwilling to cut their apron strings, still counted on ISD to handle the whole awkward, uncertain business of information presentation.

In an effort to 'stay in touch', Bob Sun had instituted with Johnny Johnston a programme of visits to departmental units, allowing for perhaps two such calls a week. Giving the growing number of units to be covered, it was estimated that each unit might be visited perhaps twice a year. In reality, the intervals were to become progressively longer - so much so that, by the next time round, it was often pointless discussing topics that had been raised the time before.

The visits became, in effect, social calls, useful for discussing establishment scales and possible staff movements, but illuminating principally for the visitors, who departed envious of the way in which some units were acquiring equipment and technological apparatus far in advance of anything possessed in Beaconsfield House.

Technology became the new battle cry. Hong Kong's leading newspapers had long been computer literate, while ISD newsroom personnel were still battling away with ancient typewriters and teleprinters. Though younger recruits were anxious for the department to emerge from the Iron Age, the 'old guard', whose technological excursions had been limited to changing typewriter ribbons, were more sceptical. Despite what David Wilson may have said about the technological advantage in processing the text of the Joint Agreement, they thought computers should be left to accountants and bank tellers.

The newly-formed Information Technology Services Department, the listing of which in the government telephone directory fell immediately after ISD's - and was the cause of frequent confusion when callers failed to check more closely - was given the task of deciding where, in ISD, lay the greatest need of the equipment they were empowered to dispense.

The decision went in favour of the Public Relations Division whose veterans, such as Tse Ming and Harry Tsui, had lived in almost monkish seclusion, distilling great tides of potential 'feedback' too vast for mere mortals to digest. Suddenly they found themselves required not merely to summarise today's headlines but also to hark back to hitherto inconceivably unmanageable archives of past editorials and opinions.

They were called upon, in effect, to set up a data bank from which withdrawals could be made instantly in any denomination and on any topic. No more trying to remember which past issue of GIST - by now filed in such towering columns that they threatened to collapse and smother their compositors - might contain something somebody had previously said. It had to come at the press of a keyboard.

The compilation of this huge information base took much time, manpower and heartache - particularly when hard disks collapsed and backup systems failed - but the end result was to give ISD an unparalleled resource of encyclopedic dimension.

If, for example, you wanted to know how many times the press had said nasty things about Secretary for Transport Alan Scott's proposed scheme of Electronic Road Pricing, a brilliant concept ahead of its time (and one being studied again now), you had only to key in the necessary phrase. The cumulative death knell was enough to drive the project into premature extinction and Scott, who had earlier served a spell as Secretary for Information, into accepting an appointment as governor of the Cayman Islands.

Once PRD's technological requirements had been met, the second urgent priority fell to another set of backroom boys. These were the sales personnel of Publishing Sub-division, by now installed in the high-ceilinged but poorly-ventilated rooms of the historic French Mission Building.

Much lower on the priority list was Creative Sub-division, whose artists were still grappling with paint pots, acrylics and airbrushes on large sheets of paper long after they could have been producing better results on computer monitors in a fraction of the time.