By Kris Crismundo
MANILA, (PNA) – The Philippines has a good opportunity to be the world’s data analytics hub, according to Trade and Industry Secretary Gregory Domingo.
Data analysis is a higher value chain in the Information Technology-Business Process Management (IT-BPM) industry.
This includes process of inspecting, cleaning, transforming and modeling data in order to discover useful information vital for decision making.
Knowledge and skills required to be employed in data analytics are mostly accounting and engineering expertise.
Domingo said Philippines’ edge in this emerging sector is its workforce as data analysis requires higher level of skills of employees.
“That requires more than accountants but interdisciplinary fields of engineering and accounting. The Philippines is well positioned to meet those requirements,” he explained.
”There is a very good chance we will give it a big shot to make Philippines become data analytics hub of the world,” the DTI chief added.
In this new field of the IT-BPM industry, the Philippines has seen to compete with China and India.
Domingo underlined further cooperation among government, private sector and the academe to create necessary academic structure and curricula in order to make the country’s labor force highly competitive.
As of now, Commission on Higher Education (CHED), IBM Corporation, and the government have took effort by introducing curricula in order to prepare the interested students in the field of data analytics.
“There are ongoing efforts where we are seeing some semblance of it and some companies are doing it already in the country,” said Domingo.
Meanwhile, the DTI chief said that aside from voice services, the non-voice services is also growing like data analytics.
However, voice services will remain as the biggest sector in the IT-BPM industry.
The IT-BPM industry has posted a total revenue of US$ 13.4 billion in 2012 and employed 720,000 personnel.
For this year, the industry aims to achieve its US$ 16 billion revenue target and generate 926,000 direct employment.
DTI, which initiated the industry roadmap, includes the IT-BPM industry with target revenue of US$ 25 billion in 2016, growing at an average of 17 percent annually.
With various efforts between public and private sector, the IT-BPM industry plans to create 1.3 million direct employment and 3.2 indirect employment for the next three years.