Wong Seng Hon

Wong Seng Hon has more than 30 years of experience in information technology management and business venture development.  He has been on the board of Commontown since its founding. He is also on the board of Buzzcity, and actively involved in family businesses in bicycle components and English language teacher education.

 

From 2000 to 2004 , he was consultant to the National Library Board, advising on Library 21, the board’s new masterplan, and business development. From 1999 to early 2002, he ran the Incubator at Kent Ridge Digital Labs (KRDL), which spun off more than a dozen new companies, funded by venture capital and corporate investors, including many global players.

 

As CEO of Sembawang Media from 1995 to 1998, he started up a string of Internet businesses, including Pacific Internet, for Sembawang Corporation, and seed-funded pioneering Internet companies like Silkroute Ventures and Information Frontiers.  In the process, he helped to kickstart the first wave of the Internet industry in Singapore. Through the acquisition of Hongkong Supernet, one of the first Internet M&A in Asia, he started Pacific Internet on its path of regional expansion.  He was also a founder and Board member of Asia Internet Holding, an international consortium of ISPs chartered to build a pan-Asia Internet backbone.

 

He was Senior Director of the National Computer Board, the government agency in charge of IT development, from 1986 to 1995. After setting up the environment scanning and corporate planning systems to support the Board's role as Singapore information technology master-planner, he spent four years as the Board's representative in Silicon Valley, keeping tab of the developments there during a period of epochal innovation.  During this period, he conceptualised the IT2000 study and edited the IT2000 report on Singapore's information infrastructure.

 

From 1978 to 1986, he  managed a portfolio of advanced information technology programmes at the Ministry of Defence.  These included office automation, networking, computer aided instruction, and combat simulation systems.  As a systems engineer in the earlier part of his stint in the Defence Ministry, he led a team of systems engineers to support a high level Ministerial review of the Singapore Police Force, and carried out feasibility studies into the modernisation of logistical systems.

 

He was educated at Cambridge University (MA) and the National University of Singapore (MSc), specialising in Operational Research and Industrial Engineering.