Andrej Ciz, Business Development Director for Government
Future belongs to technological innovation
You often use the term "transport telematics" to describe several YMS Group products. How should we understand this term?
In language, it is a combination of the words telecommunication and informatics. In pratice, it is a technical and information science discipline, which collects data from special hardware and transports it to information systems where they are processed and evaluated or offered for further analysis on another level. For example, an electric meter marks energy consumption of an appliance. If we connect it, for example, to an information system using the mobile GPRS technology, we create online data collection. The information system can this evaluate the data and analyse for example the appliance's energy consumption or report the times during which this appliance did not work. This is an example of a simple telematic system. Complex telematic systems automatically process and evaluate a lot of information from a variety of sources and offer it to users in such a form that they need. Telematics is thus a synergic cooperation of several disciplines.
Telematics is mostly used in transport as "transport telematics". From the users' point of view the transport telematics is all that connects the means of transport with the rest of the world. For example GPS monitoring, accepting data on current traffic situation or a non-cash form of paying toll or parking fees without the need to stop at a toll or parking collecion point. Such "electronic" services are provided using telematic systems, which also form the basis of intelligent traffic management. Alltogether it creates the so called "intelligent transport systems" known as ITS.
When you joined the company you began managing all projects in the government division. But the year 2009 was dominated by the crisis, public budgets were shrinking, projects were not moving forward. How can one lead in such a situation?
First of all I think that the crisis emerged also because of an overreaction of banks and governments to the slowing economies. Reducing public budgets was a natural solution and in the process of saving, also good a nd perspective projects were stopped. Apart from that, real budget money was not earmarked for many public procurements. Most projects were financed with EU funds or from the Operation Programme for informatisation of society, the so called OPIS. Although EU funds are just a temporary money source and I consider them to be just a "šrotovné" for the IT biznis, they do held during a crisis. We used our crisis time to "sieve" the public sector, look for space and deepen the relationships with our clients.
What are your future plans, what direction will you take?
Technological innovations is the road for us. We specialise in "niche products" from the beginning, meaning complex technical systems, which are usually not interesting to other companies precisely because they are too complex or they solve very specific client requirements. A good example are our special solutions for intelligent traffic management, which are in operation in the Czech Republic and in Dubai. They use telematics and make life much easier for institutions managing public transport. We keep perfecting these solutions and we can do this because we have a wealth of practical experience from Prague and from Dubai.