DBM's Procurement IRR Meeting Shall Be an Exercise in Albinism Genetics

Last December 28, 2005, Janette Toral of DigitalFilipino sent an email to Michael Jurado, CebuSoft President, the response of the Department of Budget Management or DBM to the CebuSoft position paper sent to the office of Senator Mar Roxas regarding Republic Act No. 9184 otherwise known as the "Government Procurement Reform Act". Incidentally, Janette keeps her ear on the ground about government ICT initiatives through her involvement with the Office of Senator Mar Roxas and other government agencies.

The response of DBM as quoted by Janette is as follows:

"On the concern of the Cebu Software Association on the RA 9184 IRR-A provisions Section 23.11.1 i.e., Eligibility criteria for the procurement of goods requiring "prospective bidders to have experience in undertaking a similar project within the last two years with an amount of at least 50% of the proposed project for the bidding", this issue is pending discussion at the Government Procurement Policy Board (GPPB). We have been informed that this issue on the single largest contract will be included in the agenda for the next GPPB meeting. It appears that the Inter-Agency Technical Working Group (TWG) is considering three (3) options to amend the Implementing Rules and Regulations provisions on the single largest contract in lieu of the existing requirement: a) the prospective bidder should have completed at least three similar contracts and the aggregate contract amounts should be equivalent to at least fifty percent (50%) of the approved budget for the contract of the project to be bid; b) the largest of these similar contracts must be equivalent to at least twenty-five percent (25%) of the project to be bid; and c) the business/company of the prospective bidder willing to participate in the bidding has been in existence and must have a track record of supplying the item or similar item subject of the public bidding at least three (3) consecutive years prior to the advertisement and/or posting of the Invitation to Apply for Eligibility and to Bid (IAEB)."

Earlier, I published a blog, "CebuSoft Takes a Position on Government Procurement Reform Act ", on the position that Michael Jurado of CebuSoft took on RA 9184.

Personally, being in the frontlines of managing government accounts in ICT projects in the past, the issue is really not much the size of the project, the equity of prospective bidders or the value of the bidded project, the issue really is in the manageability of the bidding and project. These are the two areas in the procurement and acquisition in government where there is little precedence in excellence or successful completion. The only consistent track record of government in multi-billion projects anywhere is that huge sums of money will change hand and a new elephant is always born and it is always an Albino!

If this Inter-Agency Technical Working Group (TWG) is truly intent of finishing projects that actually works, they should break up the project into manageable components:

• Bidding Management
• Project Management
• Hardware Configuration and Installation
• Network Configuration and Setup
• Hardware Maintenance
• Software Design, Development and Deployment
• Software Installation and Deployment
• Software Maintenance
• System Integration
• System/Project Documentation
• Network Security
• Data Management and Security
• Migration Services
• Post-Handover Assessment

The reason for breaking the projects up is to take advantage of highly specialized expertise and the best of breed systems, and at the same time provide local players the opportunity to bid for products and services where they excel regardless of their size.

The logic of having different service providers for Bidding Management, Project Management and Post-Handover Assessment is that three distinct expertise and service providers will ensure the project is actually completed according to specification and a system of check-and-balance is built into the management and post-project assessment of the whole project. But the most compelling reason is that nobody in government has both the expertise, integrity and credibility to deliver any of the three almost with absolute certainty. You can bet the whole Philippines' future on that.

Another mechanism to guarantee completion of projects is for large participating bidders with no local presence to have a local partner and select and appoint from among local service providers. The Original Equipment Manufacturer or OEM shall train these local partner to support all the service requirement of the client agency during the project implementation and after the handover. The agency must include a provision or clause in the service contract that such a service provider shall guarantee support even after warranty provisions have expired with a pre-agreed schedule of fees applied for specific services.

The clause must also include that in the event the bidder fails to complete or defaults in the delivery of the project and its post-handover support, it shall allow the local partner to use proprietary mechanisms of support and license this local partner to deliver OEM services and products to the agency which shall be to the account of the winning bidder. In the 1980s to the 1990s, we use to refer to this type of support as a Third Party Support Agreement. It was specifically designed to break the monopoly of OEMs with proprietary technology and to avoid the scenario of government being hostage by a single service provider. It also rationalizes the schedule of fees for after-sales support and maintenance.

I would like to believe that we should give the GPPB the benefit of the doubt but I would be very dishonest. Historically, very few benefit from these types of biddings and I have doubts if ICT biddings will be any different. Like always it will end up with only few large players, it will not be completed according to specification (assuming it ever gets finished and delivered), and almost certainly will not benefit the public nor the agency it is supposed to serve.

ICT projects will be a new wave of GPRA-inspired genetic experiments in creating Albinos from another specie of elephants.

The Choices We Make

They say our future is decided by the choices we make.

My father just like his grandfather chose someone to live his life with and raise a family and the rest is history. Then, there was me, my wife and my kids and what will probably be a whole lifetime of choices.

I chose to marry and have a wife instead of the original path I wanted for myself which is to eliminate a whole generation of bad choices. The choice I made will leave a society today that my children will have to live with. A society bred by a government that is not accountable to anyone and a population of Filipinos still unable to make the government accountable.

Look at the kind of life we have decided for ourselves today. We see law enforcers shooting suspected "car jackers" in cold blood on national television and nobody is shock. We witness and hear a Commission on Election officer lie to his teeth on prime time and made all of us look like a country of fools and we still are not angry. We can't get murderers arrested but we can have a fragile and retired military general arrested for merely insinuating that change in government is necessary.

How can you protect yourself against your own government? It has clearly demonstrated that your vote, your rights, your voice, your choices and even your life is not worth anything. If your not scared by the prospect that you can just be shot by anyone in government on national television and be branded a terrorist, a car jacker, a drug dealer, a subversive or a snatcher after a "legitimate" operation based on a "textbook" rules of engagement then you deserve to be shot. I certainly don't want my son and daughter to see my bullet-ridden body and read about me as a "suspected terrorist" shot in an encounter with a SWAT team. Even you would not like that specially when what actually happened was you were waving a number 10 stapler menacingly in a checkpoint filled with hoodlums pointing high-powered guns at you.

The present government thinks that they have something to fear in the ostentatious display of defiance by a few well-funded group of people representing themselves as "civil society". They worry about the eloquent speeches of disgruntled former cabinet members and old politicians succumbing to the flatulence of their own self-proclaimed status of being the "national conscience".

What they have to really fear more is the apathy that is growing among the greater number of the population? The population that no longer cares. The population that will choose to look the other way. I personally am exhausted at the existing avenues for redress and to think I know well both the easy and the hard way to get redress.

Imagine the kind of fatigue that majority go through everyday. The majority who either cannot afford the avenues for redress or have no knowledge that such avenues exist. I can still feel and remember the rage seething in my mind and in my heart in my own personal experience when government has failed me. Try to mathematically approximate the intensity of this rage if more than 60% of our population goes through pain of either being abused by representatives and officers of government or simply being ignored. All that plus the life of living with poverty every single day. This simply is like gunpowder in a keg, pressurized molten lava in a volcano or a nuclear chain reaction waiting to happen.

Whoever will have grand plan to bring a change in government or in society as a whole will succeed if a viable platform is presented, a new ideology is advocated, a leader emerges as an embodiment of that ideology, an infrastructure to deliver the ideology, and a resolve to eliminate the old values.

Communism has failed and socialism is not getting any sweeter. Democracy in this country has failed even its loyal adherents and religion ceases to be a refuge. Your spiritual adviser is himself either lost or confuse, a bigot, a fanatical extremist, a pedophile, or can't seem to make up his mind if he is a man or a woman and add to that have serious issues about getting married.

The new ideology if it has promise and when it does come will have no defiant adversary but the government. When the army of the new ideology marches on the street it will not necessarily get support from the population but the population will not be too eager either to put their lives on the line to defend the ideals of democracy or any fashionable version of it.

The followers of the new ideology will just march on and raise their flags and announce a new social order has arrived. This social order will not forgive those who participated in the old one. Many in government will go to prison, some will probably get shot in their offices and others will simply disappear.

This social order will be unlike any since it will only deal with government.

You might ask yourself, will this not trigger a national outcry? Did it trigger an outcry when millions of money is unaccounted for by a Catholic priest? Did it trigger an outcry that the impeachment trial of a president was never finished? Did it trigger an outcry when young men on national television are shot defenseless? Did it trigger an outcry when legislators boldly announce that they will not submit to any ethical standards? Did it trigger a national outcry when time and again public officials lie on national television? Ask yourself that and then think again!

Think about this: A sniper is more than a hundred yards from its target across a mass of people in between. He is not carrying an M-14 rifle with night and thermal scope. He is carrying a hit seeking guided Stinger missile launcher and he is just there with a mass of people between him and the target. He doesn't hide or wear camouflage. He takes a bull horn and shouts: "Hello excuse me your blocking my sights. Can you please take one step back?" People will probably look at the sniper and then look at the other side to know who is the target and take five steps back. Today, many will consider government as a legitimate target for almost anything for many legitimate reasons. Creating an atmosphere of apathy provides the right conditions for motivating people to take a few steps back to give anyone a clear shot.

There will be a lot of takers. Take your pick! You can have the Bangsa Moro, the NDF, Abu Sayyaf, Jemal Islamiyah, Cory Aquino, Loren Legarda, Boy Abunda but most of all it provides a strong motivation and a clear shot for a well-motivated group with a legitimate agenda for a new order driven by a lot less confusing ideology.

I'm not sure how this will be played out because the government is either paranoid or in denial. It cannot provide a decent way to redeem itself. Lies are becoming a policy and obfuscation obviously is becoming a virtue. And as if conning a whole nation is not enough another Constitutional Convention will now legitimize the term of what many consider a questionable presidency. Apparently our esteemed Constitutionalists believe that this country will be in better hands if the same people in government will be given a chance to govern under a parliamentary system.

This kind of thinking is like a Catholic Priest assuming that his virgin daughter will not be raped and killed if he sends her naked to Satan's bedroom on the condition that Satan converts to Buddhism. Of course, Satan will become a Buddhist, probably burn lots of incense then chops the virgin daughter to pieces after he sodomize her. But why be so gruesome? It's just another Constitution, another form of government and another lost election.

Anyway, our Commission on Election will probably guarantee that the next election in 2010 will be "trouble-free" and abides by the new constitution and the parliamentary system. The Comelec had always abided by the Constitution. We can rely on our Comelec to be really just a call away in its new anti-tapping anti-surveillance shielded PABX system. Hello Garci...

With the way election works in this country, a peaceful transition is a trip to the Yellow Brick Road! Change is eminent and it will be grotesque to many in government.

Change will be rapid cutting across the executive and the legislature first and then moving on to the judiciary. The most corrupt government agencies will probably believe that the new order will be just like any political change and think their hidden wealth will guarantee their safety. They will fall helpless victim to the system of abuse and corruption they have created. Along with hundreds of thousands of their colleagues they will find themselves locked in a dark foul-smelling abyss--well-documented, their fate sealed and forgotten.

Apathy will ensure the takeover of the new ideology will be painless for the general population. The only critical decision that the Filipino nation will make is a choice of either finishing the latest news about the new social order or watching the first episode of the fifth season of "Pinoy Big Brother".

The only funny thing that will confuse the nation's decision is if Manny Pacquiao schedules his last world championship fight on that same day.

The choices that will be available to the leaders of the new order is to spare the lives of those who nurtured the old political system and allow a rough road towards complete transformation or erase all vestiges of that system and start fresh simply because it is efficient, economical and logical.

In my life, I always believe that I have only two choices: What is right and what is easy? For most people in societies like ours, the choices are most of the time pretty obvious and for the rest, there's always apathy.

CebuSoft Takes a Position on Government Procurement Reform Act

The 4th Mindanao Information and Communications Technology Congress in General Santos City provided me with an opportunity to meet up, after some time, with Rene Sanapo of Cebu City GIS and Janette Toral of Digital Filipino. The day after the Congress, October 29, 2005, we got together for breakfast, courtesy of Leo Querubin of CrimsonLogic Philippines. One of the topics we've talked about is the Government Procurement Reform Act or more popularly referred to as Republic Act No. 9184.

Janette Toral wanted stakeholders in the information technology or IT sector to take a position on certain provisions of the law which inhibits wide participation or bids from a great cross-section of IT providers. She ask me if I can draft a position paper in behalf of the Cebu Software Development Industry Association or CebuSoft.

I naturally supported her position and did give my affirmative nod on the drafting of the position paper. Certain turn of events have forced us to come up with position paper since then. The Provincial Government of Cebu advertised an IT project worth PhP37 million and used the letter of RA 9184 as basis for their Bids and Awards Committee or BAC to start accepting bids from providers.

Michael Jurado, CebuSoft President, called me on a Saturday and ask me to start calling some of the CebuSoft members who might qualify to verify if they can actually participate. Of course Mike had already a distinct suspicion that nobody will qualify. He just wanted me to verify before he issues a position paper about the announced project and RA 9184 the next week.

Mike took exceptions to the provisions of the law because it seem to "disqualify" all providers in Cebu. Mike in exasperation emailed Senator Mar Roxas through Janette Toral a position paper. Rather than give you a brief glimpse of the position paper, I am reprinting the full text here.

Here's the full text of the CebuSoft President Mike Jurado's Position Paper on RA 9184:

Honorable Senator Mar Roxas,

IT SME’S AND GOVERNMENT

Nothing Personal just the crux of the Matter.

Selected Manila based IT companies/institutions have exclusive access to billions of e-government related projects and hardly any will trickle down to the already helpless local software development Industries.

Even in all local provincial/city LGU projects, not a single cent will go to the IT SME’s. Publicized "Invitation to bids" for such million peso projects should instead be entitled "Notice of Disqualification to Interested Local Bidders". Why publicize such an invitation when none of the readers will ever qualify? Answer-publication of such is simply to fulfill a requirement process. By virtue of the requirements publish, only selected big IT Companies based in Manila will qualify and non from Aparri to Jolo. What disqualifies the small IT SME’s ?

The Added new implementing guidelines provisions of the Law (R.A.#9184) on bidding that states that "Prospective bidders should have experience in undertaking a similar project within the last two years with an amount of at least 50% of the proposed project for bidding..." For a P30M project, one must have completed a P15M project the last two(2) years. How many from IT SME’s from Aparri to Jolo have done so? Answer: ZERO.

For projects of P5M and below, this provision is acceptably feasible for SME’s but for bigger amount projects, the SME’s are outright disqualified. Maybe disallowing projects as one big chunk over 5M be disallowed or broken up further if necessary to allow levelling.

And even if there is one who has had a P15M Project, his second hurdle is the word "similar", because the word "similar" when expounded and worded by the the BAC can come out different to what your perceived definition of "similar" is thus causing one to fail on this. The BAC, if they intend to, can play with words here to counter whatever "similar" project you present. Bare in mind that NGU’s/LGU’s are public organizations with "similar" structures as most private business enterprises with accounting and business processes to follow and they are unlikely to look at it this way, but look at similar LGU/NGU projects only favoring the selected big guys who just focus on such projects. "Similar" in technical parallelism should be the basis.

Lets dig deeper, Costwise, around 50% of the project components costs are "no brainer, just buy", "all imported" IT hardware/network appliance and software portions required of the project. The remaining 50% of the costs are the intangible technical IT tasks to be undertaken. Let’s break down further these intangible technical IT tasks at hand and spell those out further, and there is nothing in there that local software houses cannot do. Local software houses are truly capable of delivering the requirements. But NO, they have to be disqualified at the onset and make things smooth and easy for the annointed big ones. What else is new in this "realm of big government projects". IT projects will be the next wave of DPWH projects. Talk about helping SME’s and eliminating corruption.

The current developments can make one possibly conclude that some provisions or implementing guidelines were craftly created so as to conceal a discrete devious objective - create a cartel for cornering all big e-government projects to a few anointed companies. Companies capable of discretely giving bigger business or sales incentives.

Poor Provincial IT SME wannabe’s because no matter how qualified or experienced they are, the bad news for them is that none of the millions of Pesos from this juicy Marketing channel, a big brother supposedly, will ever trickle down into their pockets to help their business grow and hire more local IT Talents from the localities and proliferate IT to the grassroots. Here, Government money is not at all helping local industry but deprives them of it. The local talents can just savor the view of the millions of pesos as published and wishfully thinking if only they can qualify. "Sorry, it’s the law" BAC (Bids and Award Committee) will simply tell them. What a convenient excuse.

Another irony is that the leading government agencies spearheading such local projects do not really care about the predicament of their own stagnated local software development houses. In fact, they look at them as too small and risky
to deal with. Something like they just seem to underestimate their own kind and so they "seemingly" put their trust to the distant "more experience, high ticketed" big guys from Manila.

Local Software houses need more business channels to survive and taking away the billions of e-government market channel away from them in such a devious and subtle manner is the other side of government’s double-bladed talk -announcing to prioritize ICT and killing the industry silently at the same time, while at it, enriching "posing government businessmen" in the process too.

Suggestions: all IT related government projects must be temporarily stopped and its rational reviewed thoroughly again by all stakeholders for the following reasons:

1. ICT is the most technical of all endeavors and the BAC that awards project do not have the technical ICT expertise to properly rationalize the technical issues at hand. There is too much Vendor Specific preferencing and unnecessary horse-trading and with no consideration to helping local serious SME industry players at all, or society in effect.

2. Some implementing guidelines must be reviewed and revised to allow levelling of the playing fields. These Laws are designed to outright disqualify SME ICT companies with naturally lowered resources even though with equal intellectual capability to deliver the deliverables when given the chance.

3. If an inventory assessment of all e-government projects, both national and local, is conducted today, my technical sense tells me that majority have failed and so much peoples money have already been wasted. Please, let’s not treat government IT projects the likes of a fast-tracked DPWH road construction projects.

4. The common practice of timing the fund release of big projects at close to year end should be viewed with suspicion and require the institution of a more vigilant scrutiny/project details/bidding audit procedures from an independent body for projects like this.

If nothing is done, the milking of government coffers will continue unabated, the more our ingenuous intellectual IT talents from the grassroots are left to neglect resulting to a bigger diaspora of IT workers, at an increasing rate as Nurses today. The IT diaspora is now happening in our midst and maybe it is more convenient for National Government to just sit back and just watch the trend increase because of the projected increased dollar inflow. Talk about double jeopardy.

Government is therefore unwittingly killing the growth of the local software industry in the process, and in essence our intellectual capability to increasingly produce our own Filipino brand of software products and services, as well as the simple wish of living in one’s own country to earn a decent living.

India became a world power on IT because government purposely directed their funds to help their grass root industry players grow. In our country, the funds are being used up by the so called e-governance projects with "absolutely no consideration" to the "tax paying" grass root local industry players at all. Can we demand some change here?

I pray that honesty, integrity, concern, and love of country will not become history in this only country of ours.

Thank you for your kind attention.

Mike Jurado, November 15,2005
President, Cebu Software Development Industry Association, Inc (CEBUSOFT)

End of text from the CebuSoft Position Paper.

The Philippine Software Industry Association or PSIA in the national capital region have picked up the position paper and requested a full-text from Mike Jurado. They will also issue their own position on the law.

To date, I am still getting some of those providers including those outside the ICT sector to take positions on RA 9184. I will be writing a blog about RA 9184 and provide you a link to a copy of the law so you can make a comment yourself.

If you want to take a position please email me at:

virgilioparalisan@lycos.com

Please provide me a means to contact you more so if you represent an association with members already providing or delivering services to any local government or national agency.

Until my next blog!

Management Information Systems: Do You Really Need a Department?

Do you really need to set up a department called MIS? When ask this question, I normally counter by asking: Do you really need a purchasing department if most of your items are bought only once every three months or once a year? You're always using the phone in your office and almost all your sales are on the phone, would you want to organize a Communications Department for this purpose?

Normally, you don't and you won't, simply because you can seamlessly integrate these activities into existing processes and tasks without disrupting existing workload. In the MIS perspective, it is becoming even true today simply because the technology allows simple integration of so many activities into existing processes or workload.

In the late 80's, organizations had some section or department they called Electronic Data Processing or EDP. This all powerful department decide who, what or how "data" is going to be accepted, "process" and delivered to important people or departments who will use them to decide what will be produced, what was produced, how much, who gets paid, how much and when.

There was so much paper work to sort out and numbers to crunch that you had to have so many people just doing the sorting, the "keypunching" (There was not that many typing then!), classifying of "cards" and then the ultimate printing of summaries.

The sheer size of the computers at that time was enough to call the department monstrous. A large company with the computing needs for a workforce of more than 500 required an entire room to house its main computer and the air-conditioning system so proportionately huge nobody drinks cold softdrink in the office because most employees are wearing jackets to prevent hypothermia.

It was also the time when nobody also gets paid if MIS is down. Almost everything that amounts to putting a name and a number on paper will ultimately pass through MIS.

Today, the emergence of computer systems with smaller foot print and a thousand times powerful than its predecessors with software equally powerful and easy to use, provide users with more independence in creating data and using it. Simple secretaries can now generate list of customers and specific sets of information about them from their own desktop PC.

Most servers or central computers can now be controlled remotely right down to the keyboard of the workstations and security systems connected to it. Applications can be installed or "diagnosed" by systems administrators from
across the globe. With this connectivity and ease of communication, do you really need a whole department to run a system that can be managed from a desktop computer.

Most of the crises experienced in a network are no longer incidents related to hardware problems but software. Hardware make and design are so sturdy you can have several years passing by before the first incident of hardware problems is reported.

What is the alternative to rigid MIS structure then? The more cost-effective alternative is an IS/IT team derived from a matrix structure. The most immediate benefits from this structure are as follows:

• less need for highly specialized skills hence less manpower


• less cost in terms of salaries and wages


• multiple competencies from existing manpower


• management of technology deployment is based on existing processes


• systems design will be based on what the team knows rather than what the vendor says


• no slow down of work due to attrition


• effective IS/IT planning


• stronger commitment to long-term goals and project objectives


• faster technology diffusion from team to other levels


• better process improvement


• convenience in coordinating project tasks


• ease of competence acquisition from a Service Provider Team to your Team


• minimize the cost of expanding capabilities and infrastructure to support growth


• Initial successes will be repeatable and portable to other key business areas with less intervention from the Service Provider Team

The effectiveness of the IS/IT team is hinge on the following premises:

• The team has a clear mandate.


• Team objective or mission is clear to everyone.


• Top management must provide serious, strong and visible support.


• Team member is trained to assume role as participant of program or project.


• Team members are selected from key organic units or key process areas across the organization based on a set of criteria known to everyone.


• Team has a documented work process.


• Team has a plan.


• Team members and leader have time and place to meet.


• Strong leader.

The creation of this team will be the subject of future blogs in this section. Keep logging in or better yet subscribe to this blog.