It’s hip2b2

I was at a Philippine Internet Commerce Society General Membership Meeting (GMM). I expected the first GMM meeting to always be about enumerating future project plans and the appointment of a new set of officers. It turned out to be a lot more eventful than I planned. I met a few interesting people for the first time like Dr. Bill Torres of Mozcom fame, Bobby G of Inq7.net (who helped Migs and I with a previous project), Mrs. Ng Khai (representing the Cebu Chamber of Commerce and Industry), and Atty. Teddy Kalaw (who is my boss for the advocacy subgroup). Of course, the most interesting character that graced the event was ex-IBMer now CICT commisioner Ramon Sales.

He delivered the keynote address of the PICS GMM (at the end of the event, which was strange as far as keynotes are concerned). I was pretty curious on what this ex-IBMer’s first thoughts of his new post as government bureaucrat was. In his speech, he mentioned an incident where GMA and him were attending the launch of the Teletech Call Center Facility in Cainta. They were given a grand tour of the facility and an overview of the technology used including a short description of VoIP. In that same tour, GMA instructed commisioner Sales to study - “how best to move the entire Government to VoIP”. Now that is defintely a tall order.

This would really be great. Imagine the entire government with a single dialing plan. Every government office being just a local number away. Imagine no tariffs for inter-agencies calls stimulating inter-agency interaction. This was the experience after delivering a nationwide voice and data network for a major national government agency (in a previous life). A new redundant data network was strung over the department’s offices all over the country. The voice calls were then routed over a VoIP network. After the network was turned over, the volume of inter-office calls increased substantially. Better collaboration between regional and central offices was then facilitated. Every office in the network was just 4-digits away. Consolidated calls also allowed use to negotiate better outside system call tariffs for this department. The entire government should benefit from this.

However, moving 43,000+ government facilities around the country is no small task. An obvious challenge is providing low latency connectivity to these offices (in some cases, just plain connectivity is a challenge). Of the 43,000+ sites, commisioner Sales notes that 42,000 are in the barangay level and most of them have access to only the most basic of utilities. Another problem is teaching people how to use this new system. What to do if there are problems? Of course, they can always outsource the whole thing … But wait, the current procurement law (RA 9184) does not allow multi-year contracts! Arggghh!!! How do you get a decent price on an outsourcing contract if you have to worry about renewal year after year. Well, that is the topic of another blog.

Mr. Sales’ address was principally about how ICT is important to country and that we IT practioners should never forget that “we are in it not just for the technology but to do business”. The business of the government is to make the country run smoothly. If VoIP, as well as other ICT technologies, can help in this endeavor then it must be pushed. At the end of the day, it is still about the business of Nation Building.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 18th, 2006 at 12:39 am and is filed under Musings and Speculations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.