The government and the private sector have taken on the gargantuan task of pulling the Philippines from its current ranking of 99th in the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) Ease of Doing Business Report all the way to the top 20 by 2020.
To achieve this, the public-private National Competitiveness Council (NCC) has even enlisted the services of a foreign adviser who will help benchmark the Philippines’s progress with that of New Zealand, which topped the latest round of the IFC survey.
Dr. Stefan Korn, the NCC adviser, said one way to achieve this ambitious leap is through the so-called design sprint.
A design sprint is a five-phase operations concept that helps answer critical business questions through rapid prototyping and user testing. Korn said the design sprints can be implemented in three projects: in setting up a Wikipedia for local government permitting processes, establishing a concierged registration initially for Quezon City, and in accelerating the existing online registration with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Under this concept, the NCC can set up a five-month work plan to implement each of the five phases for these three areas, and can be done by December if the plan starts in August.
2020 vision
“Our vision for 2020 is to be within the top 20. The next step after streamlining is automating. It’s automating that will bring us where we want to be, which is in the top 20,” said NCC Public Sector Cochairman and Trade Secretary Ramon M. Lopez during the Fifth Annual Ease of Doing Business Summit held at the Philippine International Convention Center.
The automation should be at a level that businesses can set up their operations with submissions of requirements done through a mobile phone, he added.
“This is challenging but doable,” commented NCC Private Sector Cochairman Guillermo Luz, noting that the Philippines’s current competitiveness ranking below the midpoint in Asean is worrying.
“We’ve improved but we are rated below the midpoint in Asean and that is simply not good enough. We can’t accept being seventh out of 10 in Asean. We want to be able to improve this so we have to push government online,” Luz added.
One step forward is the creation of online portals for industry, trade and national-quality infrastructure, to name a few.
To fast-track the placement of digital infrastructure, Luz suggested going outside the traditional procurement process, as well as the hiring of independent tech entrepreneurs to build it.
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Lopez said the vision is to have all government agencies involved in running a business in a single automated system. “It’s just linking all these agencies up.”
Image credits: Nonie Reyes
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