ICT

The use of Information Communications Technology is an “imperative” for all sectors of society, whether in a developed or developing economy. If we wish to equal if not surpass our Southeast Asian neighbors, ICT must be utilized by government to service the needs of our growing population. I have asked Virgilio L. Peña to be my guest columnist this week. He proposes a modified approach to e-governance. Ver is a former IBM colleague who succeeded me as President of IBM Philippines. He is also a former Chairman of the Commission on Information and Communication Technology.

Achieving e-governance through public private partnerships

Drivers’ licenses can now be renewed in Land Transportation Offices located in malls and other public places. Similarly if one needed an authenticated birth certificate, they call a number and have it delivered right in their homes after paying the necessary fees to their bank. What is common in the two situations? Both systems happened to have been developed by the private sector using the concept of Public Private Partnerships ( PPP ).

During his State of the Nation Address, President Aquino identified Public Private Partnerships as the main strategy of his government in achieving his goals for infrastructure development.

PPP has become a widely used acronym in many discussions related to ICT. For the uninitiated, it is a joint undertaking between government and private sector in the implementation of public service projects. To demonstrate how seriously this concept has evolved, at least two OECD countries (US and Canada) have even institutionalized Public Private Partnership Councils to become the focal point of all PPP activities in the country. Many of the Best Practices of PPP coming out of these Councils have been infrastructure related projects which include highways, seaports, schoolhouses, hospitals, etc. All of them involve participation of the private sector in the delivery of public service ranging from the use of their financial resources to the management and operation of these facilities.

Of course, many will say this is nothing new in the local context, considering that we have many existing facilities and services which were developed using the same concepts, as in the two examples I used earlier. The legal basis for all such projects is the Build Operate Transfer Law, more commonly known as the BOT Law (R.A. 6957 amended by R.A. 7718 ). The BOT Law covers many types of participation by private sector: BOO, BTO, BLT, etc; all acronyms for different combinations of building, operating, owning, etc. The law provides that private sector can partner with government in the delivery of essential government service to the public. Examples of these are many of our existing and planned roadway and ports facilities.

E-government projects in other countries have also availed of this scheme to accelerate the development of computerized systems in the delivery of vital government services. Lifting an excerpt from the website of the US National PPP Council:

“This is the age of information technologies, but there can be a hefty cost of getting a system operating. Through public-private partnerships, many governments are now able to fully participate in “e-government” with their constituents, or effectively coordinate government activities and budgets. Better service, improved tools and saving money are exactly what public-private partnerships are all about. “

The Philippine government is no novice to PPP’s and the use of the BOT Law when it comes to e-Government, as in the case of both the Land Transportation Office and the National Statistics Office in my example above. However, having been enacted to address major infrastructure investments, some provisions of the BOT Law do not necessarily fit many ICT projects. This is perhaps the reason why a number of them under the BOT scheme have either failed or have been interminably delayed. One reason could be that the projects involved high cost infrastructure which were not direct components of the ICT solution (land, buildings, roadway, etc.). As such traditional IT vendors have shied away from these “mega-projects” and became merely subcontractors rather than the prime contractor.

Sadly also, a number of these projects in the past have been stained by controversy caused by claims of corruption with some ending up in court cases. 

Outside of a BOT or variations thereof, PPP can also apply to projects that do not require major investments in infrastructure outside of ICT products and services. Government can provide the funding from appropriated funds but outsource the operations, management, and maintenance to private sector. A good example of this is the recently concluded Automated Computer Elections. The entire process was completely outsourced and in this case, even the Data Centers used were private sector owned with Comelec not needing to acquire any of their own equipment.

This is probably the better approach to implementing an outsourcing strategy for e-government projects. Funding can also come from the e-government fund, a fund set aside annually in the General Appropriations Act for the implementation of government ICT projects. Instead of investing on facilities such as a building and computer rooms, government can utilize existing private sector IT Data Centers (IDC’s) and outsource the systems and application development to application service providers (ASP’s).

This approach will also remove the necessity of government agencies maintaining an ICT organization. After all, it is impossible for them to keep up with the salary scales for IT professionals outside to retain the required skills inside government.

This approach necessitates a complete redesign of the skill set required of government professionals. They will no longer need hardware, network, and software specialists. They will not even need computer programmers. The valuable skills will now be in familiarity with government processes that need to be automated, requirements definition, scoping the ICT solutions required, project management, and development of service level agreements (SLAs) with the outsourcing provider.

We have always positioned the Philippines as the world’s preferred destination for outsourcing, be it in the form of call centers, Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), or Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO). It is time we move to the realm of GPO (Government Processes Outsourcing) using Public Private Partnership which will accelerate the development of e-government and eventually allow us to transcend to e-governance.