By Alexander Villafania
QUEZON CITY, METRO MANILA – President Benigno Aquino III recently issued an executive order that placed the Commission on Information and Communications Technology (CICT) under the Department of Science and Technology (DoST), a move many questioned despite pressing concerns from various groups regarding the ICT direction of the country.
Executive Order 47(http://www.gov.ph/2011/06/23/executive-order-no-47/)converted the CICT into the Information and Communications Technology Office (ICTO), a bureau under the DoST. The new bureau puts the total number of sub-agencies under the DoST at 22, not including the regional offices and provincial S&T centers.
Meeting with members of groups involved in ICT last July 5, DoST Secretary Mario Montejo assured them that the former CICT's directions would remain steadfast and that the transfer is actually beneficial to the government's goals for ICT.
Montejo stressed on a “leaner, meaner planning and management” of government resources with the former CICT now on board. On the other hand, there are no indications as to what the set up would be for the new ICTO, whether it would be status quo from the previous CICT structure or a new structure would be in place.
The CICT is a seven-year old agency that was being groomed to become the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT). Created in 2004 after the model of the original Information Technology and E-Commerce Council (ITECC), the CICT had the mandate to set the direction for ICT development in the Philippines.
It started with an ICT master plan in 2004, which later developed into the recently launched Philippine Digital Strategy (PDS).
Questions were raised as to why the DoST was chosen to take the CICT. Some say that if one agency should have taken the CICT under its fold, it would be the Department of Transportation and Communications (DoTC), which twice held the CICT.
For all intents and purposes, the DoST is primarily a science and technology agency, tasked to develop a community of science, research and development in the Philippines.
Unknown to many, the DoST has had ICT programs for years. A closer look at its organizational chart(http://dost.gov.ph/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&catid=58:about-dost&id=102:who-we-are&Itemid=82#rgchart) shows one sub-agency, the Advanced Science and Technology Institute (ASTI)(http://www.asti.dost.gov.ph/) as among those that are in the ICT research and development field. It has a list of projects that are mostly on ICT.
Just among the projects that the ASTI has been undertaking for years are the Open Academy for Philippine Agriculture (OPAPA) virtual classrom, wireless telemetry and remote monitoring platform, digital library system, and even web-hosting and .gov.ph domain delegation.
The flagship project of the ASTI is the Philippine Research, Education and Government Information Network (PREGINET), a major backhaul Internet infrastructure that connects local academic and government institutions to international counterparts. This huge broadband network has been in use since 2003 – long before telecommunications firms started brandishing “broadband” Internet for local subscribers.
ASTI was also among the first in the Philippines to test Internet migration capabilities to the new Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6). It had helped the CICT hold expositions on IPv6 in the Philippines.
Apart from the ASTI, other DoST sub-agencies that have also done ICT-related projects in varying degrees are the Science and Technology Information Institute (STII) and the Science Education Institute (SEI). The other sub-agencies are also depending on ICT in their respective fields.
To some extent, the CICT could be at home with the DoST. Still, lingering doubts as to what would happen to the directions that the CICT has placed for itself persist. Hopes are still high that what the CICT had started would be continued by the ICTO.
