DICT forms council of chief info officers to streamline gov’t ICT initiatives

The Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) on Wednesday launched the Chief Information Officer (CIO) Council in a bid to streamline the agency’s efforts to digitalize the bureaucracy.

At the sidelines of the CIO Council launch in Manila, DICT Secretary Ivan John Uy told reporters that the creation of the inter-agency body was mandated under the DICT Charter or Republic Act No. 10844.

Under Section 13 of the RA 10844, the formation of the CIO Council shall be facilitated by the DICT.

It shall be composed of CIOs from national government agencies, with the DICT chief serving as chairman. The CIO Council is tasked to assist in the implementation of government ICT initiatives.

The law defines a CIO as a senior officer in government agencies responsible for the development and management of the agency's ICT systems and applications.

“The CIO Council puts together all the different government CIOs into one group… and I sit, as Secretary of ICT, as chair of the council,” Uy said.

The DICT chief said the CIO Council was “never convened” when the DICT was formed as a new executive department in 2016.

“When we came in 2022, we saw this is one area that has not been acted upon. Now that we’ve been rolling out a lot of e-government projects and initiatives and with that… we are consolidating all different government agencies, making sure that they collaborate, they share information,” Uy said.

“So we felt that the council, which was provided for by law, should really be convened because this allows for all government [CIOs] to be under one group so we can all talk, we can all share what are the challenges, what are the initiatives that all different government agencies are doing and synergize all our efforts together to push for better e-governance,” he added.

The DICT said that among the initiatives to be implemented by the CIO Council is to streamline data gathering standards among all agencies.

“For example, in one agency, the data format for birthdate is day, month, year while on the other it’s month, day, year… the public finds it difficult to transact with the government because of varying data formats, data standards… so this CIO Council was convened to ensure that the public will be dealing with one government,” Uy said.

Another initiative to be implemented by the CIO Council is to have a data center backup-sharing among various agencies, which will then translate to cost savings for the government.

“With this synergy, all of the agencies, of course, have their main data center… but the backup is shared… Let’s say five or six agencies share one backup, since it’s only on standby and it’s not likely that all of the five agencies’ systems will be down… the government can save a lot of cost because that backup is just on standby. Agencies are doubling their costs on backups but it’s only on standby so we’ll optimize,” Uy said.—AOL, GMA Integrated News