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Friday, August 12, 2005
Outsourcing options needed
With the success rate of call center recruitment efforts averaging only two to five percent, industry players should look into the outsourcing of other services, like legal and accounting, to increase employment.
Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. and Smart Communications Inc. chief executive officer and president Napoleon Nazareno said the English language skills of Filipinos is deteriorating, making it harder to staff call centers, so Philippine firms should consider “moving up the outsourcing value chain” and going into software development, computer graphics and animation instead.
“Inarticulate and underutilized” lawyers and accountants could also be eligible for business process outsourcing (BPO) services, he suggested during the Sun.Star Economic Forum 2005 at the Waterfront Cebu City Hotel and Casino Wednesday.
One possible area they could get into is the review of legal contracts for companies in the United States, Nazareno said.
This would not require them to have excellent communication skills.
When sought for comment, however, Integrated Bar of the Philippines-Cebu City Chapter president Alex Tolentino advised caution, citing the need for Filipino lawyers to study US laws. He also wondered if they would not be required to secure licenses to extend such legal services.
“Reviewing contracts is part of the practice of law. We would have to check if we could do that,” Tolentino pointed out.
During the forum, Nazareno said there is a need to train students in school to “work in a global context.”
With BPO making it possible for Filipinos to provide services to clients anywhere in the world, he cited the need to rapidly raise the digital literacy of Filipinos.
“Quantum leaps in education are key to attracting the investments needed for sustained prosperity,” he said.
He said ePLDT Inc., PLDT’s information and communications technology arm, is already helping in this effort by providing wireless connectivity to some schools in Manila and bringing the Internet closer to the Filipinos through its Internet café chain, Netopia.
Netopia, which has 165 stores, receives an average of two million users a month.
Nazareno talked about the Maine Learning Technology Initiative, wherein the government purchased laptops for its 36,000 public school students and saw an increase in learning and decrease in the students’ behavioral problems.
He said it was not far-fetched for poor countries like the Philippines to embark on a similar initiative.
In a talk with former education secretary Florencio Abad, he said he learned that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had designed laptops that could cost only about $100 or P5,600, making them just as affordable as today’s low-cost cellular phones.
However, a participant in the forum raised the “productivity paradox” problem in technologically advanced countries, like the United States, saying computer literate teenagers may just spend most of their time on gaming.
Nazareno acknowledged the pitfalls but said digital education should be pursued just the same.
To show how far the country still had to go, he revealed that in some schools that ePLDT had tried to help, the first obstacle was the teachers, who were not Internet-friendly.
“If we don’t start, we don’t get anywhere. I’m not saying it’s easy. We should start the education now. We’re putting our bets on this one,” he said. (CYR/With CTL)
(August 12, 2005 issue)
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