 Welcome to ITU Telecom World 2016 in Bangkok, Thailand and I'm very pleased to be joined in the studio today by Erzan Idiyazi, who is the Director of Global Operations Division of the Office of Information and Communication Technology at the United Nations. Erzan, thank you very much for being with us in the studio today. Thank you for inviting me. Perhaps we could start off by telling our viewers a little bit about what the Office of Information and Communication Technology does. The Office of Information and Communication Technology of the United Nations is pretty much responsible for the delivery of FICITI services to the United Nations Secretariat. As you know, the United Nations Secretariat is very large. It has offices in over 500 locations around the world and we are responsible for the delivery of FICITI services to all of these offices. Now in terms of the Sustainable Development Goals, the UN Sustainable Development Goals that are attracting a lot of attention at the moment, I wanted to ask you how can ICTs help achieve the STGs? Obviously the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals lies with Member States. What we can do is actually be a glue that connects all Sustainable Development Goals. In some of the Sustainable Development Goals, technology plays a bigger role. In some of the Sustainable Development Goals, not so much, but we are committed to work with all the partners around the world to help them do the implementation. Especially it is important in terms of reporting on the progress of the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals. There we touch on data. One fact is that about 90% of data that is currently available is actually produced in the last two years, which is impressive. So now what we can provide is the analysis of that data that can give us a lot of pointers and key performance indicators for the delivery of these goals. From where you stand, do you think that the digital divide is any close to being bridged? Well, in my professional career, I spent about six years in the Department of Field Support working for Peacekeepers and when I was working in West Africa, at that time the national provider had about two megabit internet line. Since that time till now, which is what, about 10 years, there was a tremendous progress really. So I wouldn't really agree that the digital divide is very wide. It is much, much closer than it seems. And what United Nations is trying to do in collaboration with other United Nations agencies, including ITU, is to assist member states to actually in the areas of applications as well as infrastructure, bridge this divide. How important is collaboration to you? Oh, without collaboration we just cannot succeed in any of the areas that we are doing. For example, we see collaboration on several levels. We see collaboration on the level of employees and in that sense we are developing a lot of tools that are connecting different United Nations agencies' funds and programs. I can mention that we are moving towards federating our directories so people can easily chat between each other and have informal or formal groups. But at the same time, we also need to collaborate with internal to the United Nations between the funds and programs on the formal projects. However, that's not all. As a United Nations system, we also need to collaborate with member states, with academia, with other international organizations. In that sense, the leadership of Secretariat Office of Information and Communication Technology is really important because of the sheer amount of people that we have around the world that can assist in this collaboration and the leadership under our Assistant Secretary General, Mishri Yazi. Finally, what's the value to you of events such as ITU Telecom World? Why are you here? I have been participating on and off at these events since 2011 and very important for us from United Nations Secretariat is that we get to do two things. First, present what we can contribute to the other organizations. But at the same time, we also want to see what member states as well as private and public sector can actually give to us and how can we find areas of collaboration. In that sense, this year we have been talking quite a lot about creation of innovation centres, which is very, very important for the Secretariat. These innovation centres are supposed to be research centres where we can provide technological solutions for the sustainable development goals. Brilliant. Well, thank you very much indeed for joining us in the studio today and we look forward to catching up with you again in the future. Thank you for your time.