DEAR Mr. President:
I am writing you about the fact that many National Government Agencies (NGAs) and local government units (LGUs) have been unable to comply with your orders to digitalize the delivery of their public services, in line with your administration’s goal of achieving the so called “ease of doing business”.
I think that the problem is two-pronged. Either the NGAs and LGUs do not have enough budgets for digitalization, or they are burdened by the complexities of public bidding rules, which could take months or even years to process.
In the meantime, the public is suffering from the travails brought about by the “difficulties of doing business” with the government.
I found the courage to write you directly, because I believe that I have found the solution to the two-pronged problem.
Firstly, the solution is very cheap and very affordable, and therefore solves the problem of not having enough budgets.
Secondly, the cost of the solution is way below one million pesos, which means that a public bidding is no longer required to procure it.
And since the solution does not require the procurement of goods, it may not even require the canvassing process at all. Mr. President, I am referring to several offerings of free mobile apps that are already available for the use of the NGAs and LGUs, should you accept the offers of the developers behind them.
I have been coordinating with these developers, such that I know who they are, and how to contact them. When necessary, these developers are also willing to conduct the training for their actual users at the national and local levels on a batch-by-batch basis to make it more affordable and economical. The educational content of these training modules is proprietary, which is the reason why these are exempted from the usual procurement rules.
Mr. President, I also heard you say several times that you would like the online services of the NGAs and LGUs to be fully interoperable, aside from being digitalized, based on my many years of experience as a manager of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) systems and projects, that would be very difficult to do if the backend systems are written in incompatible codes.
Of course, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) could be used, but the compatibility is always a challenge. Often, inexact data conversion would affect data conversion.
One advantage of mobile apps is that the codes are written in the same “environment” such that APIs are not needed. What is important is that the data at the backend or the back office is readable by any browser.
This is not very difficult to do, because most data files are now browser-friendly, and if they are not, data conversion technologies are now very reliable. The most common format for this is Comma-Separated Values (CSVs).
Mr. President, technically, these developers are offering web apps and not mobile apps, but the differences between these two have practically disappeared. The web apps that are being offered could run on any device, using any browser, meaning that they are already 100% mobile friendly.
The main difference between the two is that mobile apps are “native” to the device (meaning installed on the phone), and web apps are not. That is a disadvantage, because it takes up too much of the phone’s space and memory.
By the way Mr. President, there are many other ICT practitioners who are willing to help the government improve its public services via internet and mobile solutions. We are just waiting for your call./PN
