IfG.CC -
Institute for eGovernment

“It is high time that the bill calling for the formulation of the DICT to be passed into law so the country can craft better the policies and standards of all the ICT programs in the government,” said George Kintanar, a member of the CIO, an organization of all chief information officers working in different government offices.

The e-government readiness index is comprised of web measure index, telecommunication index and human capital index.

The e-participation index measures the willingness and ability of a state to provide relevant information and quality services and to engage citizens in a dialogue in the process of service delivery and public policy making through the Internet.

Government websites in the Philippines are vulnerable to computer attacks and without a nationwide cybersecurity program, government cannot keep hackers at bay, an official of the National Computer Center (NCC), an agency under the Commission on Information and Communications Technology (CICT), said Monday.

Angelo Timoteo Diaz de Rivera, NCC director general and e-Government Development Group commissioner, said that the CICT has already won government approval to create a P20-million pilot program for cybersecurity but has not received any budget.

This was announced by the Bureau of Customs (BOC) on Thursday after the system was successfully executed at the Batangas port late last month.

The Philippines slips lower in a network readiness study, which indicates the need to improve the country’s own information and communications technology infrastructure.

Results of the Global Information Technology Report 2008-2009, Philippines placed 85 out of 134 countries in the network readiness index that identifies points that allows for a country to establish and improve their own ICT infrastructure.

This was the directive of the Civil Service Commission (CSC) as it called upon government agencies, particularly the human resource management divisions, to closely monitor and ensure that their respective personnel comply with the directive.

Cagayan de Oro, the capital city of the fastest growing regional economy in the country in 2008, is in the forefront of the country´s initiatives in Information and Communications Technology (ICT) as one of ten identified Next Wave Cities and one of the sites during the "high-tech" multi-site videoconference launching "Convergence 2009".

The Philippine National Oil Corp. (PNOC) recently broached the idea of reviving a government-owned data center, as its own data storage is nearly at full capacity.

The ITU deputy secretary-general, Houlin Zhao, visited the country in order to better understand how the progression of IT in a developing country can impact industry, especially during the time of a global economic downturn. The case of the Philippines is particularly intriguing as private sector IT-driven companies have continued to expand despite the gray economic climate, largely due to the growth of the business-process outsourcing (BPO) industry.

"I think it's too early to say that it failed. We do have success stories, like the eLGU project of the National Computer Center, the electronic library project of several government agencies, the community e-center of the CICT, and the Anti-Money Laundering project," said Virgilio Peña, CICT chairman, about Roxas’s statements in the Senate oversight committee hearing on e-commerce.

In a survey conducted by the UN, the Philippines shared the 17th rank with Austria in countries that use web-measure index, which assessed the quality of government websites and the level of utilization of information and communications technology tools in government.

UN resident coordinator Rafaello Tarroni said that the objectives of the WSIS action plan are to build an inclusive information society, promote the use of information and knowledge for the achievement of internally-agreed development goals and address the new challenges of the information society.