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Dr Smith Suksmith graduated from the Faculty of Medicine at Siriraj Hospital and trained to be a neurosurgeon at Chulalongkorn Hospital, but he hasn't practised medicine since he discovered another calling almost two decades ago.

Smith decided to hang up his white coat and stethoscope, put away his scalpel and enter the world of IT technology. He shifted from standing at operating tables to sitting in front of computers.

Now a full-fledged IT expert, he was one of the key people behind the development of radio frequency identification (RFID) systems in Thailand. He has since taken on the greater responsibility of promoting and leveraging the local software industry, as director of the Office of the Computer Clustering Promotion (CCP) at the National Science and Technology Development Agency.

Smith says he fell in love with computer science while he was a medical student at Siriraj, where he joined the computer club.

"As a member of the computer club, I learnt new things about the technology and felt very excited to keep in touch with it. I used the new knowledge to help the hospital to develop software for internal use," he said.

His first program was computer-aided instruction (CAI) software to help the hospital train students about thalassaemia and embryos using computers.

"I really love computers," he said. "You know, I spent my weekends working in a part-time job at a computer shop in hopes of learning more about computers."

You could say that Smith was following two parallel paths at that time: medicine and computers. Although he wanted to be a doctor, when the time came he chose to switch to computers by studying for a master's degree in Management Information Systems (MIS).

"My life goals changed," he said. "I found that I eventually wanted to be a technical architect designing systems to connect the world of technology to end users rather than a professor doing in-depth research in medicine."

And so began Dr Smith's new life in IT. After getting his master's degrees in Information Systems from the University of Washington and in Management Systems from Seattle University, he worked in the US as an IT consultant for Anderson Consulting before returning to Thailand in 1994.

"On coming back home I was eager to do anything related to IT. That year, I decided to put my money into setting up a software development company with friends," he said.

Smith and his friends founded the company Atrium to develop Thai optical character recognition (OCR) software. The software converts text scanned from documents into a format that allows it to be altered or edited.

The work went well and Atrium succeeded in developing Thai OCR for commercial purposes.

"We were proud of what we'd done. But after the product went on the shelves, all our pride as well as our investment came to nothing. The software was violated and it was really hard for the company to survive," Smith recalled.

Even though Atrium was shut down, Smith pursued his career in software by setting up a new company called CT Asia to develop call-centre software for use in Thailand and abroad.

At this point he had a revelation. While pitching the project to an international company, he realised that local software companies had to raise the standard of their development process to come out with better quality products.

"Because of this, I decided to go back to the US to learn the processes to develop quality software, and I got what I wanted," he said.

While there, Dr Smith also worked as a technical consultant at an IT consulting company. He was assigned to oversee the development of an IT system for the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). As chief architect, he proposed developing a national data bank for the department and moving the system from mainframe to PC servers.

Built on four-terabyte data warehouse architecture, the system contained all data related to US agriculture as well as social welfare, allowing officials better access to information and reports for further planning. The project received an award for excellence in 2002.

In the meantime, the Thai software architect got involved in another project, to help USDA develop animal-tracking technology to link up with its data-warehouse system by using RFID.

"This was a new opportunity that drew me to learn about RFID technology," Smith said.

Eager to learn more, Smith joined the MIT Media Lab's Auto ID Centre in developing RFID technology. There he gained the knowledge that would make him one of the leading RFID experts in Thailand.

Smith saw that the technology was in its infancy and would play an important role in the future, so it was a great opportunity for Thailand.

Remembering his plan to one day use his knowledge to help Thailand's development, the former doctor decided to return home in 2003. He proposed the development of RFID technology in Thailand and collaborated with the National Electronics and Computer Technology Centre (Nectec) to implement the idea.

As RFID was new in Thailand, he educated the market about the technology while also setting up a company, called Identify, to develop RFID solutions for the Thai market.

"In the three years I was involved in RFID development, I saw a lot of improvement. People now know more about RFID and the adoption of this technology here is increasing," he said.

Today Smith has greater responsibilities. Since stepping up to take charge of the Office of Computer Clustering Promotion a year ago, he has had to boost the local software industry while leveraging local software developers' skills to help them find markets.

"Our strategy is that we will work with government agencies under government-to-government contracts to receive software-development contracts. Once we get a project, we design the overall system as software architects and then pass the development work over to software companies," he said.

The idea is to stimulate local software development by ensuring there is a market for such companies, as well as to help them improve their skills to make develop software for export.

So far, the office is handling more than 80 software development projects for government agencies and has 50 local software companies participating.

Although most of the hard work still lies ahead, Smith said he never gets tired of it. He hopes that he will eventually push his office to become a centre of excellence for software architect for the government sector.

"With our technical expertise, we believe we can change the IT procurement process in the government sector from vendor-driven to technology-driven, where technology will be the key deciding factor when the government buys IT, not connections with vendors."

Though Smith has been working in the IT field for almost two decades, he's never forgotten his inner soul and wants to return to healing the sick someday.

"When the proper time comes and my two children are grown enough, I will spend my weekends as a doctor working for the community," he said.

Pongpen Sutharoj

The Nation