WHAT is bigger than a paradigm shift?
The answer to that is a sea change, period.
That settled, I am now looking for something that is higher than a frog leap, and more than that, something that is even higher than a pole vault.
I am looking for those, because I need a term that would describe the kind of jumping or leaping that we should do to become a better and stronger country.
I still remember when we once tried to become a newly industrialized country (NIC), but then the government at that time decided to lower our goals by becoming a newly industrializing country instead, perhaps saying that being an NIC is more of a journey rather than a destination.
Somewhere along the way, the government also set a goal of becoming a “tiger economy”, but that goal seems to have fizzled out as the administrations changed, and now only Mandaluyong City is positioning itself as a Tiger City.
At another time, the government also said that it wanted to be a “global economy”, but that seems to have been forgotten too, and now it is only a business district of Taguig City that has positioned itself as a “Global City”.
To some extent, we could now say that our country is no longer the “sick man of Asia”, but truth to say, we are also not out of sick bay yet. That said, we now have the opportunity or problem of becoming the victor or the victim in ASEAN integration, depending on which way it goes.
ASEAN integration has already started, and therefore it is already here. That means that it is crunch time already, and we no neither have the time to spare nor the choice to become either an industrializing country or an industrialized country.
Whether we like it or not, we just have to move on or move up to be able to cooperate or compete in the ASEAN market, and be able to come out as the victor and not the victim. As the saying goes, it is time to “pass our papers, finished or not finished”. To be able to do that, we just have to leapfrog or pole vault or catapult or jettison ourselves into a new position of strength, no matter how we do it.
I have looked everywhere and I have already concluded that there is no other way to move forward, except to use Science & Technology (S&T) in general and Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in particular.
I have been saying that a long time ago, but more so I will be saying that now, now that cloud computing is here, and with that also comes the Internet of Things (IOT), Big Data and data analytics.
Cloud computing actually gives us a double opportunity, because it supports both internet computing and mobile computing. The line between these two is actually difficult to define; because what we could do using browsers for internet computing could also be done now, using apps in mobile computing.
Whether it’s via internet or via mobile, what is important now is that everything is now cloud based, and browser based or apps based. Add to that the fact that most of the browser based and apps based services is now also fee based.
Cloud computing is actually the biggest game changer, because it now enables all organizations to go into enterprise computing without putting up their own servers or data centers. That is just on the hardware side, because there is also so much flexibility on the software side now, the fact that subscription based services are now available, with terms that are as easy as simply subscribing to a service instead of buying a tangible product.
Generally speaking, it could be said that there is already an existing software solution for each and every national problem that we have. These software solutions have already been developed, tested and deployed in many other countries, and the only remaining challenge is to modify these to suit our unique needs or requirements. As a matter of fact, many of these software solutions are already hosted in the internet cloud, and may just require simple tweaking here and there.
Putting it another way, the development costs for these software solutions have been sunk already, and whatever additional revenues that the developers could earn in other countries would just be extra money for them.
Many of these software solutions are actually owned by multinational companies that have local offices here in the Philippines and because of that, they could just offer these on a fee basis.
In compliance with our procurement laws, there may still be a need to bid for these solutions, but in many cases, public bidding may no longer be necessary because most of these are proprietary in nature. And because in premise servers are no longer necessary, there will be no more need for capital expenses (CAPEX), and instead, budgets from Miscellaneous and Other Operating Expenses (MOOE) would already serve the purpose.
Call it what you like, but the end result of this is leapfrogging or pole vaulting, as the case may be./PN
