By: Jerome Auza
The latest ranking of ICT councils placed Bohol last among 42 other cities and provinces even with the efforts of the provincial government and the Bohol ICT council in the past years to influence the improvements in telco services, power situation and general readiness for ICT enabled services.
The BICTC’s new set of officers, who were elected in March 4, 2015 during the general assembly held at the Panda Tea Suites conference room, accepted this news as a challenge going forward. The council has already recognized the challenges in Bohol as the province tries to be a destination of choice for BPOs.
While Bohol is already connected via fiber optic cable to the domestic fiber optic networks of both Globe and PLDT, the so called last mile services, still needs a lot of improvement. Internet access service, in general, is not as reliable as users expect, even for business accounts. But Internet connection is not our only challenge.
We have an issue on the reliability of our power supply. We are very dependent on the single link to the national grid in Leyte. This was painfully clear in November 2013 after typhoon Yolanda severely damaged the power infrastructure in Leyte and Bohol was plunged into extended blackouts. Until we have a second link to the national grid, perhaps going to Cebu, we have a single point of failure for our power supply. Or perhaps, Bohol should have its own power production capability, preferably from renewable sources.
On the other hand, there is a thriving small and medium IT enterprises or SMITES in the province, making do with the available telco services. You may have not known yet that a small group of Boholanos are developing very advanced analytics software used around the world already. We have a group of mobile apps developers who are experimenting on various apps . Also, there is an unrecorded number of free lancers that make a living doing various services like software development, graphics editing, drafting and content production.
Aside from these SMITES, Bohol also has several entrepreneurs that developed innovative products and services that are uniquely Boholano but not directly ICT-enabled. Maybe Bohol should also promote the stories behind the products and services of these entrepreneurs. The province should position itself as a place of innovation, no matter what the field.
Then we use ICT-enabled services and systems to promote our own entrepreneurs. Maybe it’s the way to go in exploiting ICT to increase jobs in Bohol rather than try to invite BPO locators that have stringent prerequisites that would still take years for Bohol to put in place.