I KNOW that a sea change is bigger than a paradigm shift, but I do not know what is higher than a frog leap, or I should say a leap frog.
Could it be jettisoning?
Whatever is higher than a leap frog is what I am looking for, to describe the big leap forward that we could take as a country, towards a better future, by using the best that information and communications technology has to offer.
With all due respect to anyone who might feel offended, I would say that the Philippines missed the boat in the agricultural age, missed it again in the industrial age, and almost missed it in the information age.
I said almost missed, because we caught the tail end of the information age, and practically made good at it, better late than never. It is not really late as it seems, because we can still jump into the transformation age as early as possible, and make the most of it.
I am willing to be accused of being an incurable optimist, but I truly believe that the Philippines could go back to a position that it once held, that of being No. 1 in South East Asia. I believe that we have all the ingredients to make that happen again.
Not only that. I also believe that we could also become an economic superpower in the region, over and above the position that we used to have. The ingredients that I am talking about include our human resources and our information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure, among others. You might say that these are just people and machines that I am talking about, but these are the foundations upon which we could build a better future.
For the record, there appears to be no category of human talent that is available elsewhere in other countries that we do not have. Add to that the fact that there is ICT infrastructure that is available elsewhere in other countries that we also do not have.
For sure, the development of all nations in the decades to come will be ICT driven and there is absolutely nothing that would prevent our country from moving forward to take the driver’s seat. What is important from this point onwards is to know where we want to go, and to know as well how to get there.
Just to give you an idea of where I am coming from, just be reminded that the overseas Filipino worker (OFW) phenomenon is what saved our economy and is one of the main factors why we have survived as a nation all these years.
Of course we know that the OFW phenomenon is big, in terms of the billions of dollars that are remitted back into our country from abroad. I may not have the numbers to quote right now, but I really believe that the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) phenomenon could surpass the billions of dollars that we are earning from the OFW phenomenon, hands down.
Needless to say, almost everyone knows that the ICT infrastructure is the one behind the BPO phenomenon, because the latter could not function without the former, absolutely. Aside from being behind the BPO phenomenon, the ICT infrastructure is also in the frontlines in many forms of information based and knowledge based industries.
It is very ironic that our country is now a major provider of BPO services for the rest of the world, and yet we are not utilizing BPO here to deliver public services to our own citizens. Very few government agencies are utilizing BPO services and you can just count them with your fingers.
Not too many agencies are using Short Messaging Service (SMS) servers either, despite the fact that there are more mobile phones in this country than people. I think that this is the hurdle that we have to jump over, to learn how to use technologies locally starting with our own government agencies, so that we could perfect these technologies and eventually offer these to the rest of the world.
Included in these technologies are cloud computing, big data, server clusters, data analytics and internet of things (IOT), among others. Either to be used singularly or in combination with others, these technologies could be used to create and offer more BPO services in ways and forms that have not been imagined before.
Whatever services we would offer to the rest of the world, we should not forget to also offer it to our own citizens. It would be a waste of resources if we are utilizing our own ICT for the benefit of other countries and yet we are not using these for the good of our people.
As we offer more ICT and BPO services, we will be creating more value added that would create new wealth for our country thus making it richer and stronger now and in the future./PN
