The Chief Information Officers Forum (CIOF) and the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) will hold a round-table discussion (RTD) on “Procurement Models of Cloud Services” on 30 October 2019, 8:30am-4:30pm at the UP National Engineering Center, UP Diliman, Quezon City.

Some 30 participants from key stakeholder agencies are expected to share their concerns and experiences with procuring cloud services. Attendees are expected from Department of Budget and Management Procurement Service (DBM-PS), Government Procurement Policy Board (GPPB), Commission on Audit (COA), and DICT.

R.A. 11032 (“Ease of Doing Business and Efficient Government Service Delivery Act of 2018”) and R.A. 11055 (“Philippine Identification System Act of 2017”) mandate government services to be available online by 2020 at the latest, per implementation schedule of R.A. 11055.

As early as 18 January 2017, DICT Department Circular 2017-002 was issued “Prescribing the Philippine Government’s Cloud First Policy,” making the country one of the pioneers in ASEAN to adopt a cloud policy framework. But operationalizing the policy is problematic. Several government agencies find it hard to migrate their frontline services to the cloud due to difficulties in procuring cloud services.

Recently, GPPB provided relief by amending provisions of WETI (water, electricity, telephony, internet) to incude cloud under internet services, making easier for agencies to renew (no more bidding); under WETI, agencies can increase or decrease capacities while contract remains active. But first procurement remains a problem.

In this light, CIOF’s Committee on Policy and Research is teaming up with DICT to conduct a series of RTDs to explore modalities of procuring cloud services in parallel to R.A. 9184.

The ultimate objective is to enable more agencies to put more frontline services online. The series of RTDs will explore additional possibilities of cloud procurement, including: (1) Declare cloud services as part of goods and services (infra as a service); (2) Modes of procuring the ML/AI aspects of cloud services; and (3) GPPB ordering agreement with cloud service providers, with agencies just ordering from PS.