"This is a body composed of industry players, public and private sector representatives. We coordinate efforts in our bid to push Cebu to be the ICT hub in the country," said Garcia on her welcome speech during the kick-off event of the 2nd Cebu ICT Strategy Summit last Wednesday. That same day, the Provincial ICT Council was also launched.
Provincial ICT Council Executive Committee member Caesar Atienza said that the council is established to ensure that the benefits of ICT would reach to the grassroots in the countryside, not just in the urbanized, metropolitan areas of the province.
Created under Executive Order number six, the Provincial ICT Council is a result of the momentum from the ICT summit held in 2001 and the efforts of the province for ICT development. The council is a consolidation of the minds of industry stakeholders, government officials, the academe, and the private sector. Some of the pertinent details on the membership and the organizational structure of the council is however unavailable as of yet.
The council is organizing the three-month 2nd ICT Strategy Summit, which is positioned to identify the ways and means on how to achieve the goal for ICT development in the province. The ICT Summit also aims to take a blueprint on how the province could develop the ICT industry and communicate its benefits to the countryside.
Summit Executive Director and Cebu Educational Development Foundation for Information Technology (Cedf-it) Boni Belen said that the summit will serve as the learning and strategic planning platform for Cebu's major ICT stakeholders, in collaboration with key resource persons and IT experts from other parts of the country and from collaborating IT organizations.
"The overall objective of this 'internal strategic retreat' is to bring together the ICT stakeholders in Cebu 'to make certain that all the essential ingredients in transforming Cebu into an ICT hub' be genuinely present, or at least that the work towards making these key components available are being or will be seriously pursued," Belen disclosed in his presentation.
On the same development, Commission on Information and Communications Technology (CICT) commissioner Dondi Mapa disclosed that the commission is preparing a roadmap for ICT development in the country which is to be unveiled on May this year. The plans he said are still formulated and will be presented to President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo once finalized. The plans however can't be made public.
Considered as an integral part of the Philippine ICT cyberservices corridor, Cebu is one of the main areas of focus in the roadmap. "We want to maximize the job-creation capacity of the industry here in Cebu. We also want to see clearly how ICT can be used to educate the Cebuanos. We see Cebu as a major component of all these efforts for ICT development in the country," Mapa said.
Furthermore, Cebu will be an experimental site for wireless technology. "The Commission decided that Bantayan Island in northern Cebu is the ideal place for this experiment," he said.
Ng Khai Development Corporation chief executive officer Wilson Ng who is also the Cebu Business Month 2006 chairman said that the challenge for the industry now is to make ICT relevant to the ordinary people. "According to statistics, only 99.5 percent of the business in the country today is benefiting the ICT. So the challenge now is to educate the 99.5 percent of the existing businesses across the country about the use ICT in managing their businesses better," he added.