BACOLOD IS EYEING TO MOVE HIGHER IN THE 2011 TOP TEN NEXT WAVE CITIES RANKING

In the midst of the adverse reactions against the dissolution of the Commission on Information and Communications Technology (CICT), the Bacolod-Negros Occidental Federation for Information and Communications Technology (BNEFIT) is still expecting a positive mark for Bacolod should the score-carding program of “next wave cities” for 2011 push through.

BNEFIT is currently eyeing the top spot for Bacolod in this year’s evaluation. Last 2009, Bacolod was in the fifth place and moved two notches higher or in the third spot last year.

Speaking as its chair of BNEFIT, I am confident that this year will even be better because of what has transpired after the 2010 results especially in the area of human capital development and infrastructure. We made sure that these developments were evaluated for purposes of the 2011 ranking. But whatever the results will be, it is best to let everyone know of the reasons why Bacolod has a good chance to rank higher.

We have been consistently the highest among the Top Next Wave Cities for the business environment criterion especially with the support of local governments and the presence of BNEFIT, as a multi-stakeholder organization that promotes programs to attract IT-BPO investments.  

Today, the IT-business process outsourcing (BPO) industry in Bacolod has generated almost 10,000 direct jobs which translate to an annual salary of more than one billion pesos.

The Commission on Information and Communications Technology (CICT), the Business Processing Association of the Philippines and the Department of Trade and Industry are behind the annual ranking, which assesses a city’s (including its province and nearby cities) potential as an IT-BPO location in terms of human capital, costs of doing business, availability of real estate, reliability of telecommunications infrastructure, and business environment.

THE REASONS WHY WE ARE HOPEFUL

Among the reasons why we are confident of a positive ranking is the strong and clear show of desire by the provincial government to complement and reinforce the gains of Bacolod, which was achieved by the strong collaboration and cooperation of government, academe and the business and private sectors of the community.

The Negros Occidental provincial government has recently embraced its role as an enabler and a catalyst for growth to support the initiatives in Bacolod. Last June 2, 2011, Hon. Alfredo G. Marañon, Jr., Governor of Negros Occidental – called for the 1^st Negros Occidental ICT Summit which was a beginning of a series of initiatives that the provincial government will undertake. Marañon appointed me as former chair of the Bacolod IT Focus Team and current chair of BNEFIT,  as consultant for the Negros Occidental ICT Investments Program.

Recognizing that its capital city Bacolod has been cited as the 3^rd Next Wave City in the Philippines for 2010 and the Tholons International Top 100^th City in the world for outsourcing, the local stakeholders who attended the summit had identified strategies to involve everyone in the goal of making Bacolod and eventually, Negros Occidental among the best global services destinations in the world.

For its part, the Bacolod IT Focus Team chaired by Councilor Al Victor Espino has been closely coordinating with BNEFIT and the provincial government.

Local governments and the business sector of cities like Talisay, Silay, Bago, San Carlos and Kabankalan have been actively participating in provincial initiatives such at the recently-held Negros Occidental ICT Summit which is a preparatory session towards the creation of a three-year provincial ICT roadmap. The said roadmap is anchored on the recently-launched Philippine Digital Strategy 2011-2016 and the Philippine IT-BPO Roadmap 2016.

The local roadmap, just like its national counterparts, will seek improvement in the areas of e-governance, ICT education and trainings, enhanced broadband and real estate infrastructure and development of local ICT business throughout the province.

HUMAN CAPITAL DEVELOPMENT

In the area of human capital, the provincial government’s contribution is the Negros Occidental Language and IT Center which provides bridging courses to address the skill gaps of graduates and the labor force in general.

Through BNEFIT and NOLITC, Negros Occidental and Bacolod were among the pilot sites of the BPAP National Competency Testing (BNCT) last April. The BNCT is an industry-initiated assessment program, which proactively generates industry-ready talents for the Philippine IT-BPO industry and standardizes the competency assessment system for applicants in the IT-BPO sector.

The goal of the provincial roadmap is likewise to involve the academe in developing strategies to further improve human resource especially for the non-voice sector of ICT and ICT-enabled services. The province is also bent on developing incubation programs within the province for software development, animation, game development, health information management, transcription and coding, and knowledge process outsourcing, among other things. In this way, we would be able to train and tap our graduates in the whole province and provide employment for the jobless.

GREAT LEAP IN REAL ESTATE AVAILABILITY

In the area of real estate, Bacolod only had a total of less than 10 hectares of presidentially-proclaimed IT economic zones accredited by the Philippine Economic Zone Authority (PEZA) in the early part of 2010. Today, the figures have been multiplied five times.

With the new presidentially-proclaimed Northpoint Technohub, almost 13 hectares property of Ayala Land which is the first IT Park outside of Bacolod and the Two Sanparq building beside the One Sanparq location of Convergys.

For Bacolod, the three new large additions to the growing number of IT economic zones have been accredited by PEZA, but are still waiting for its presidential proclamations. These are in the north, the Central District IT Park, almost 12 hectares property in Lacson Street, Barangay Mandalagan accredited in August 2009 while in the south, the Grand IT Park in Araneta Street, Barangay Singcang, more than 14 hectares property, accredited last February 2010. The third site is the SM City property. The sites are still waiting for the concurrence of Bacolod Mayor Evelio Leonardia.

The provincial government will likewise contribute to the real estate need with the establishment of the Negros First Cyberpark – a mixed use complex consisting of more than 12,000 square meters of space for IT-BPO services and several thousands more for support facilities such as restaurants, shopping areas, spa, banks and many others.

The other presidentially-proclaimed IT economic zones in Bacolod, are Luxur Plaza IT Centre, Monfort IT Center, San Antonio Park Square, The Block IT Park, Robinsons Cybergate IT Centre, Bacolod Information Technology Park, Lopue's East IT Center,  Lopue's South IT Center,  and St. Francis IT Centre.

Jocelle Batapa Sigue

AN UNTIMELY DEMISE

The vision of the Commission on Information and Communications Technology (CICT) is a society where citizens have access to information and communications technologies that provide quality education, efficient government service, sustainable economic development and a better way of life. By virtue of Executive Order No. 47 dated June 23, 2011, which was issued without prior consultation with all the stakeholders – the CICT met its untimely demise, about twenty-four hours right after it produced one of the most concise and well-esteemed national digital roadmaps in Asia today – the Philippine Digital Strategy (PDS) 2011-2016 - a document selflessly and sincerely prepared through public-private sector participation as a gift, a concrete support to the Aquino administration as it traverses another 5 years of governance with the end in view that the CICT’s vision, which we are quite sure is shared by His Excellency Benigno Aquino III, will be achieved.

And so today, the ICT sector is still left wondering why President Aquino has to abolish the CICT when it is one of the most vital agencies the government has and needs if we still, as a country aspire to leave our third world status. I remember a Harvard-schooled American lawyer telling me last year when I intimated to him that our current government is not keen on supporting the unanimous call of many sectors for a department on information and communications technology – he simply said “maybe your president, for one reason or another, wants you to remain as a third world country”.

It is difficult to accept the reasons. Cost-saving at what cost? The latest information I got is that the ICT office created under the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) as a replacement of CICT still asked for the same budget as CICT for 2012.

History will show that National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) originally belonged to the Department of Transportation and Communications (DOTC), and was later attached to the CICT, transferred back to the DOTC in 2005, then back again to the CICT. But today, EO 47 killed the CICT and placed the NTC under the Office of the President, and I read in one newspaper, directly under Executive Secretary Paquito Ochoa, along with the Philippine Postal Corporation. While the National Computer Center (NCC) and the Telecommunications Office (TELOF) were attached to the DOST. If streamlining is really the objective, why was the NTC and TELOF not returned to DOTC Secretary Mar Roxas?

Executive Order 269 dated January 12, 2004 established the CICT as the primary policy, planning, coordinating, and implementing, regulating and administrative entity of the executive branch of Government that will promote, develop, and regulate integrated strategic ICT systems and reliable and cost-efficient communication facilities and services. As framer of the PDS, we honestly believed that ICT can be a tool for a transparent and graft-free government that the current administration promised the nation in the last elections. Even prior to the creation of the CICT, the government recognizing the importance of ICT in improving government service by making it more efficient, transparent and accountable, already created the e-Government Fund, which later on became one of CICT’s main thrusts when it was created in 2004.

The e-Government Fund was created in 2002 by the Information Technology and E-Commerce Council (ITECC) as a source of funding for government ICT projects that will be prioritized by the ITECC, especially ICT projects which were cross-agency in nature.

When the CICT was created in 2004 and took over the functions of the ITECC, the management of the e-Government Fund was transferred to the CICT. Since its inception, the e-Government Fund supported the development of various projects from more than 50 government agencies totaling PHP6.4 billion. Noteworthy projects funded by the E-Government Fund include the E-Government Portal, Bureau of Customs e-Customs Project, Bureau of Internal Revenue Integrated Computerization Project, Department of Budget and Management Government e-Procurement System, Development Academy of the Philippines K-Agrinet Program, National Computer Center e-LGU Project, and e-TESDA Project, just to name a few.

Today, the e-Government fund, along with the ICT office is under the DOST led by Secretary Mario Montejo who happens to be the brother in law of Executive Secretary Ochoa.

Aside from governance, EO 47 seems to also by-pass the importance of ICT in education. Many stakeholders perceive that the framers of EO 47 thought that ICT is only about the business process outsourcing industry and about broadband networks. But the most hardly hit by EO 47 are the talent development initiatives of CICT.  One of the most important CICT initiatives is ensuring all public high schools in the country have broadband Internet access, so that high school students will be exposed to computers and Internet by the time they go to college or seek employment. This was a big task, given the more than 6,000 public high schools in the country and the archipelagic geography of the Philippines that limit the availability of Internet access. Through the combined efforts of the CICT and the Department of Education (DepEd), more than 5,000 public high schools have computer laboratories and more than 3,000 public high schools have Internet access to date.

Among the CICT’s flagship projects is the iSchools project, which provides computer laboratories with Internet access to public high schools. In addition to computer hardware and Internet connectivity, the CICT also provides training programs in ICT Literary, Laboratory Management and Sustainability Planning that differentiate the CICT’s programs with that of DepEd’s. The CICT has set-up almost 700 computer laboratories to public high schools, more than 70 percent of which have Internet connectivity. The CICT was already in the process of connecting about 200 unconnected schools through satellite broadband Internet and delivering hundreds more of computer laboratories. The iSchools project was a recipient of the Digital Inclusion Award at the FutureGov Government Technology Awards 2009 and Philippine Government ICT Awards for the Digital Inclusion Category.

Another education-related project of the CICT is the eSkwela project, which provides a computerized learning environment for out-of-school youths by digitizing the content of the DepEd’s Bureau of Alternative Learning System. The establishment of four pilot locations in Quezon City; San Jose Del Monte City, Bulacan; Cebu and Davao was funded by the APEC Education Foundation. In addition, the CICT has collaborated with other stakeholders in the establishment of an additional eighteen sites, where the CICT provided the content and training and the partner provides the computer laboratory, and targets to set up at least 320 more new sites before the end of 2010. In the October 2008 Accreditation and Equivalency (A&E) Test given by the DepEd, the average passing rate for eSkwela sites was 65.12%, while the national average was at 22.94%. The eSkwela project was a recipient of a Certificate of Commendation at the UNESCO ICT in Education Innovation Awards 2007-2008.

Finally, let’s talk about how CICT helped plow in thousands of jobs of the country through a combination of pro-ICT government policies and a non-interventionist approach to industry development. Today, the country is widely recognized around the world as the top alternative destination for voice services, with India reduced to second. The industry, which now includes call centers, back office operations, software development, medical and legal transcription, engineering design, animation and game development, has grown to a USD9 billion industry employing a total of 2 million direct and indirect workers as of 2010.

As the Philippine IT-BPO industry has grown tremendously over the past ten years, the country has been consistently named as outstanding off-shoring destination, and cand aside from the Metro Manila area, cities like Cebu, Davao, Clark, Sta. Rosa, Iloilo and Bacolod already received international distinctions.

Too many things had been left in shambles by the abolition of the CICT. For one many of the cities outside of Metro Manila feel, we are now on our own. The CICT has nurtured and incubated provincial locations for BPO jobs for the last 6 years and we are proud to say that we have bonded together under one confederation, in the spirit of collaboration and sharing of best practices.

At the end of the day, we still ask the question – why the CICT met its untimely demise? In the coming months – we really hope the President will hear us out as we are also prepared to listen.