(Continued from yesterday)
ONE disadvantage that government agencies have to deal with is that they always have to choose the lowest bid from among the offers, even if it is not the highest quality. This is the reason why it is very difficult for government agencies to have high quality systems even they would really want it.
Of course, this problem could also be traced to the fact that government budgets are also very limited, and that is why the government agencies are forced to spread out their funds by choosing to buy at the lowest prices. Small as the government budgets are not much is also left for capital expenses (CAPEX) after the manpower and miscellaneous operating and other expenses (MOOE) are taken out.
It goes without saying therefore that the procurement of fee based services on a subscription basis would be the best deal for the government. One advantage of fee based, web based and cloud based subscription services is that the government agencies need not spend on servers and data centers anymore, not unless they would still want to put up their own Local Area Networks (LANs).
In theory, they may still be a need to bid out subscription services, but if the content is exclusive and proprietary, the bidding requirements may be waived. That would result in a win-win solution for the government agencies, to have high quality services at the lowest costs.
Many of the global companies that already have local offices in the Philippines have already successfully implemented many fee based, web based and cloud based subscription services in many other countries, and it would not be too difficult for them to tweak the software used in these services to suit the local conditions. And since these companies have already recovered their original development costs for these products, they could be willing to tweak these at minimal costs.
In some cases, some of them might be willing to subsidize or donate these products, to generate goodwill or perhaps as part of their corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs.
As of now, a National Organizing Committee (NOC) is being formed by some representatives of these foreign companies, for the purpose of preparing a plan that could move this idea forward. At the same time, an advisory council is being formed by some former heads of the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) and the National Computer Center (NCC) for purposes of guiding the work of the NOC.
As the saying goes, there is a technical solution to every problem and it does look like this initiative will really bring a solution to some of our problems such as traffic, crime prevention and customs administration, to name a few.
Not too many people might have noticed that the design of information systems have already changed from the old client-server architecture to the browser-website architecture. What that means is that there is no more need to install software into the personal computers (PCs), and that any PC could already be used for as long as there is a browser installed.
As a matter of fact, any smartphone could now be used to be able to browse any website, but what is even better now is that mobile apps have been developed to make it easier to access web content from a smartphone.
Hopefully, this opportunity will be able to narrow the technology gap that we have in our country now./PN
