Bacolod City Councilor Jocelle Batapa-Sigue has underscored the importance of the role of the local private and business sector in speeding up the entry of Bacolod and Negros Occidental in the Roadmap 2010, a comprehensive study of the Philippine outsourcing industry.

Batapa-Sigue, convenor of the ICT provincial conference on November 15 and 16 in Bacolod City , said yesterday Bacolod and other cities in Negros Occidental should be among the so-called “next wave cities” to be identified by Commission on Information and Communications Technology and Business Processing Association of the Philippines .

Roadmap 2010 is one of the initiatives of the CICT under the Office of the President, and the BPAP to capture ten percent of the world's of the business process outsourcing industry in the country in the next three years through public-private sector initiatives which aim to enhance talent development, expand the geographical spread of the country's outsourcing capabilities and further improve the business environment for investors.

Without the support and active participation of the academe, real estate, telecommunications, the business community and the private sector, Bacolod and Negros Occidental will not be able to seize the opportunity to be part of the BPO Roadmap 2010, she added.

The Roadmap 2010 will detail the aspirations of the Philippine BPO industry to hit the $13 billion revenues and one million jobs by 2010 and the initiatives needed in order to achieve these goals.

Batapa-Sigue said most of the data by required by the study will come from the private sector, and government must simply provide a venue for the productive consolidation of these data and identification of concerns.

She said Acting Commissioner Monchito Ibrahim of the CICT Cyberservices Group is asking the assistance and cooperation of various stakeholders in the ICT sector in providing data about the province, and its respective cities and municipalities that would serve as relevant inputs to the study.

The ICT conference in Bacolod, Batapa-Sigue said, is similarly designed to the Roadmap 2010 which is being developed to identify challenges, roadblocks and doable solutions regarding issues like inadequate human capital that will negatively impact their competitiveness, lack of telecommunications infrastructure in prime locations in the region, and lack of solid ICT statistics from local governments and government agencies.*

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