The Philippines should accelerate the promotion of business process outsourcing to help improve the country’s competitiveness.
"We have to further improve our infrastructure to facilitate both domestic and international trade, enhance human resource development particularly for IT engineers and professionals," says Maricor Akol, president of the Philippine National IT Standards Foundation, Inc.(PhilNITS).
Speaking before the recent Computer Science Congress sponsored by the De La Salle Computer Society at the De La Salle University, Akol stressed the need for close cooperation among the academe, industry and government in developing the IT industry.
"The need to establish mutual trust and confidence between the offshore vendor and its customers based on proven results is important in building and promoting offshoring," says Akol.
"The offshore vendor should provide a quality and high performance in IT project management capability as well as excellent IT professionals at low costs."
Akol says that this could be achieved through a continuing world-class IT training and certification program for IT engineers and professionals.
"IT professionals’ training should include not only technical training but should also have values formation training to produce IT workers with good work attitudes and sense of responsibility and consistency in spite of the difficulties encountered in the strenuous and time-conscious IT workplace."
The Philippine National IT Standards Foundation (PhilNITS), formerly the Japan IT Standard Examination Foundation (JITSE) is committed in promoting the country’s IT certification program towards economic development.
Akol also underscored the importance of information and communications technology (ICT) in boosting the efficiency of the increasingly integrated global economy.
ICT would enable the Philippines and developing countries to improve their resource allocations and also boost economic growth, Akol added.
She cited some of the areas where the Philippines has the competitive advantage aside from offshoring include contact centers, application development and maintenance, legal and medical transcriptions, animation, and software design and engineering.
