By Tom S. Noda
Computerworld Philippines
July 27, 2009

“Let us have a department of ICT (DICT)!” was President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s clear command in her last state-of-the-nation address (SONA) on Monday to sustain and improve further the local BPO (business process outsourcing) and tourism sectors in the Philippines.

Speaking over a live nationwide TV broadcast at the House of Representatives, president Macapagal-Arroyo directly dedicated her message to congressmen, for the country to finally have a DICT. It is a development that has long been clamored for in the past seven years.

The president gave the order after stressing how the local BPO sector in the Philippines performed well against global recession. She said unlike the electronics industry, the BPO sector proved to be resilient with the ongoing global economic crisis.

“In the past if the electronics sector grew, today we’re creating wealth by developing the BPO and tourism sectors as additional engines of growth,” Macapagal-Arroyo said. “Electronics and other manufactured exports rise and fall with the state of the world economy but BPO remains resilient.”

She noted that with earnings of $6 billion and employment of 600,000 “the BPO phenomenon stays eloquently of our competitiveness and productivity.”

The president cited that from year 2008 to 2009, the Philippines remained to be “the only country among Asian economies that didn’t shrink.”

“According to Moody’s [Manual], our state of the nation is a strong economy,” Macapagal-Arroyo said.

She added her administration is the only one in Philippine history that invested three times more than any administration on technical and skills training, benefiting present professionals on the voice and non-voice BPO work such as medical transcriptionists.

The president also included in her SONA that her administration is now taking action on calls against telecommunications firms about the missing cellphone loads of subscribers.

“I am asking the national telecommunications commission to take action on calls against missing cellphone loads,” she said in Filipino.

However, the president expressed celebration with the 2010 automated poll project of the Commission on Elections (Comelec), which was legislated by congress almost 10 years ago in December 1997 through the enactment of Republic Act No. 8436 or the Election Modernization Act, authorizing Comelec for the first time to use an automated election system.

“The 2010 automated polls. We got it! Thank you Congress!” the president said.

Macapagal-Arroyo’s DICT request to congressmen signaled her approval for the transformation of the current Commission on Information and Communications Technology (CICT) into a full-blown department, manifesting a command to congress to approve the pending DICT bills. CICT’s existence is only under the executive order (EO) of the president.

Senator Edgardo Angara, head of the Congressional Commission on Science and Technology and Engineering (COMSTE), said in past interviews that the conversion of CICT into a government department is a must in order to have “focus” on the issue of policy direction of related government agencies such as the Department of Science and technology (DOST), Telecommunications Office (Telof), National Telecommunications Commission (NTC), and National Computer Center (NCC).

CICT chairman Ray Anthony Roxas-Chua III, earlier denied that there would be a “bloating of the bureaucracy” once the commission becomes a department, saying there will just be a merger of existing agencies.

“We’re not even asking for an additional budget. But what we’re expecting is a synergy of the agencies to focus on areas that needed attention,” he said.

Roxas-Chua said another concern on why CICT needs to become a department is that the commission’s existence is fragile since it only relies under the president’s order or EO.

“We’re only under the president’s EO and the next administration can always dispose us anytime they want to,” he said, adding there is less than a year to go before the 2010 national elections.

He added CICT currently lacks people for its projects due to rationalization, and Telof with its 4,000 employees will certainly be a big boost in their manpower needs.

“The Telof with its 4,000 people also has regional offices, but due to the advancement of mobile technology their relevance is slowly decreasing,” Roxas-Chua said.

According to a recent study by Ovum, the creation of a DICT in the Philippines could rally the local ICT economy around a maximum of four capability areas such as medical and legal transcription, engineering, software-as-a-service (SaaS), including building businesses around open source technology.

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