Muhammad Reeda holds a BA Social Sciences from Curtin University of Technology in Perth, Western Australia. Reeda’s background spans both government and industry ranging from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs where he started his career, to Malaysian conglomerate, Sapura, to regional Telco Systems Integrator Commverge, to running his own IT consultancy, all the way to his current position as General Manager, E-Government Business at Telekom Brunei Berhad.

Reeda is founder and Manager of #Brunei Channel on an Internet Relay Chat Network called the Undernet, which is one of the largest real-time chat networks in the world, with approximately 45 servers connecting over 35 countries and serving more than 100,000 people weekly.

Reeda is also founder of anakbrunei.org, a popular Bruneian photoblog with social commentary on the current events related to Brunei Darussalam and Bruneians both at home and abroad. Contributing writer from Brunei Darussalam for cnet Asia technology blog, Kurapak Teknologi.

From The Brunei Times

ALTHOUGH he is on the forefront of Brunei’s Information Technology industry, Reeda Malik actually qualified with a Bachelor of Arts, Social Sciences in Sociology and Anthropology from Curtin University in Perth, Australia. His colourful story begins the same as any other Bruneian, but Reeda says that the turning point came when he was held back a year in secondary school.

“I came from Seria, a small town boy, and went to St Margaret’s (in Seria),” said Reeda, “I didn’t do particularly well in my studies until I reached Form Four, and repeated Form Four. “It wasn’t until then that I decided to pull my socks up, and in doing so got good results for my ‘O’ levels,” he said. “I went to Maktab Duli (Pengiran Muda Mahkota Al-Muhtadee Billah College, Brunei’s only Sixth Form Centre at the time), and it all came good from there.”

For the first time, Reeda was out on his own, away from the house as a hostelite, “I was having a good time,” he said, but he would face the consequences and not obtain the ‘A’ levels he had set out to gain. Undeterred, Reeda went on to study at Technical College, where he excelled, and continued at the Insitute Teknologi Brunei (ITB).

His hard work paid off and he recieved encouragement from his mentors to apply to university. “I spent only three months at ITB because my lecturers there insisted that I go straight to a degree programme,” said Reeda.

It would be these formative years in college and completing his degree in Western Australia where Reeda would take on a broad range of subjects that would shape his career.

“In Maktab Teknik I studied business, and I applied for computer studies at ITB, and in university I applied for a place to study management information systems (MIS),” he said. “Starting off with MIS, the following semester I switched to business, then to Film and Television. I also did a bit of psychology. I ended up majoring in sociology with a minor in anthropology,” he explained.

“By qualification I’m actually a sociologist, and that has contributed a lot to what I’ve become today, because of that curiosity of what makes society tick and the trends in society.”

The benefits of having such a diverse academic life were at first not obvious, but did help produce a man not only well read, but also leading him to a contrasting career. The end result would benefit him greatly.

“Two weeks after coming back to Brunei, I got a job with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA),” said Reeda. His role as a Diplomatic Officer in the Asean Department lasted five years. During that time, he was also involved in organising the APEC Summit in Brunei in 2000.

Reeda was also the officer in charge of relations between the private sector in Brunei and projects being put into practice from the APEC Business Advisory Council (ABAC) and the Pacific Economic Cooperation Council (PECC).

“After that, I was looking for something new. There was this whole new e-Government thing taking off,” said Reeda, who at that time was considering whether or not he could contribute more, but this time outside of the public sector.

He left MFA to open and look after the Brunei office for Malaysian conglomerate Sapura. “I ran that for almost five years. During that time, I contributed a fair bit to shaping what e-Government is (today),” he said. “We were playing quite a big role in strategic planning for e-Government. We came up with Version 1.0 for the e-Government with Accenture, who are the partners with BAG Networks.”

It was not so long before his natural curiousity and creative mind began seeking new challenges. “Getting bored again, I was looking for something new to do,” said Reeda, “so why not start something myself?” The answer was opening up his own firm, doing more of the same, starting with IT consulting.

“I did this for about three years, and came to find that the Brunei market is not ready for full-on e-Government. It was during that time I got a phone call from an old colleague, who said, ‘Hey, why don’t you join us?’ So I joined the Ministry of Industry and Primary Resources and helped them devise their web strategy in 2006 and 2007.

“At that time the Internet was gaining popularity (in Brunei) and web services were popping up, and I helped them with their online strategy,” said Reeda. “After this, I got an offer from TelBru to do more of the same, looking at new business opportunities apart from what they were already providing,” he added.

Which is where Reeda finds himself today. “I’ve always had a passion for IT, with the Apple IIe and continuing with IBM and PCs. I believe that mine is a passion. If you take the study route and you’re studying just to get the qualifications, then it won’t be lifelong learning,” said Reeda.

“Although I don’t have any formal IT qualifications, I picked up a few things here and there. Of course I read a lot about these things. My area of interest is the impact of IT on society.” In particular, Reeda has a great interest in how IT changes the dynamics between the citizens and the government.

“How does IT help citizens interact with the government? Complete interaction with the government?” asks Reeda. “If you asked that question five to 10 years ago, you’d have drawn a blank, because at that time e-services and that kind of thing, people wouldn’t have thought that it would have become like this social networking and complete interaction with the government.”

The advent of social networking and how big the scale of interaction between the average man and government organisations has been greatly affected by the arrival of technology, he said. Asked what he thought lay in store for Brunei, Reeda said that even more people will be using the Internet, giving way to more IT-literate Bruneians.

“I was passing the carwash and the boys there were having a break and were on their laptops. There will come a time when these devices will be so ubiquitous people will be using the Net to interact with each other.

“When they interact with each other, it is called ‘collective intelligence’. This is happening in Brunei right now, but at a very ‘cautious’ rate. I think that further down the track the authorities will realise that this collective intelligence is a very useful tool,” said Reeda.

“In terms of education, like I said, there will be more and more educated Bruneians. It is no longer an option, the knowledge society is there,” he said.

Reeda believes that Brunei would benefit from more “think tanks”, but not necessarily in the conventional form. “Think tanks in a more traditional sense would be something like Centre for Strategic Policy Studies, with a formal structure. My concept of a think tank would be virtual, and I think yes, the more the better.

“You are gathering people’s thoughts. People are more than willing to contribute to solve certain problems or to give their ideas on certain issues. They just need to be given a chance,” he said.

“I think that at the moment the trend is every organisation, be it private or public sector, needs to have a web strategy,” said Reeda, adding that the staggering number of people and amount of information on hand can have great effect not just on organisations and institutions, but also entire nations.

“Just look at Facebook, with 200 million of people on there, and Twitter, and half a billion people watching the recent Michael Jackson memorial, and closer to home there is H1N1,” he said.

Reeda pointed out that the dissemination of “collective intelligence”, from reading what happened yesterday in newspapers today to reading the latest information on websites and social networking platforms, has become even faster with the arrival of Twitter. “It’s getting faster and faster. If we don’t catch up, we’ll be left behind,” he said.

For the next generation of Bruneians, Reeda feels they should leverage their “awareness” of issues and current affairs.

Being a father, he feels that his older children, “the ones that are becoming teenagers, are more aware, and this is general about kids nowadays.

“They are aware of their surroundings, of the issues, and they should leverage on that, and should keep it up. I think it has to do with the whole Net generation,” he said.

“Kids today can learn about anything, anytime. It’s not about the teachers just teaching them, it’s about facilitating them,” he said.

For Reeda, it’s amazing to see how much more aware younger people are of issues regarding the environment and global warming compared with his generation. “It’s good to see they are passionate about it. I like that.”

Asked for words of encouragement for the next generation of Bruneians, Reeda said, “Learn as much as you can. I cannot emphasise that enough.”

For someone without any formal qualification in information technology, his underlying passion for things IT, fused with his varied background, has given him a unique perspective in Brunei.

Despite thinking of himself as belonging to an older generation, Reeda Malik is hardly conventional, and very well could be one of the first examples of a newer, more abundant, IT savvy generation of Bruneians.

The Brunei Times