THE future looks brighter for the Philippines when it comes to analytics that it needs to further develop deeper skills beyond business-process outsourcing (BPO), according to a global company’s top executive.
While the country continues to become the destination of choice for the BPO globally, its growth is deemed not sustainable over time.
“We’re going beyond that. We’re going to HR [human-resource] processing, finance outsourcing and things like that. And we go from there to having more added value in the way we do service to the world. So we’ll put some analytics in HR processing; we’ll put some analytics in finance outsourcing,” IBM Philippines President and Country General Manager Luis Pineda told the BusinessMirror.
“Hopefully, we can do more and more analytics work there, and beyond that we can really do deeper work like research and development here in the Philippines. That’s how we see the future of analytics here,” he added.
Compared to BPO that is projected to generate $21.8 billion in revenue and 1.23 million jobs in 2015, this country, being considered a potential major player in the data-science field, could benefit more in analytics, whose global-market value is estimated to be around $232 billion this year.
Approximately, 4.4 million high-value jobs are expected to be created worldwide this year, of which 30 percent will be initially fulfilled.
“And that’s the reason we help the Philippines develop a curriculum for analytics because the jobs that will be required not only here, but globally is seen increasing. That’s what we predict,” Pineda said.
In today’s digital era, more and more information are produced that, eventually, become so complex to process using on-hand database management tools or traditional data-processing applications.
With the emergence of the so-called big data, analytics, as a multidimensional discipline, come into place to interpret raw data.
The insights produced in the process are then used to recommend action or to guide decision making rooted in the business context.
“That’s how companies now are realizing that they can get a lot better insight and guidance by analyzing not only their client’s behavior, but the data that’s out there so that they can make better business decisions,” he said.
Seeing analytics as a “fast-growing” industry, he encouraged more initiatives from both the public and private sectors to ensure that the country is well-positioned to seize growth opportunity from this, a precedent of which is Analitika—a social and professional organization of private, public and academic institutions and individuals who are interested in the sciences and practice of analytics.
This industry-led consortium defines the new professions that will be required by the transformed industries and guarantee the availability of the required talent.
IBM worked in 2012 with the Commission on Higher Education in developing the curriculum, which so far has been adopted by 45 universities and produced around 500 graduates.
Also, the company is helping the academic sector train the teachers or professors themselves to effectively teach analytics-related courses.
“We’re also working with the private sector to make sure that the people who take up these classes will have a job when they get out from these schools. That’s not only in IBM, but jobs in other industries here in the Philippines because most of these companies, if not all, are actually doing some sort of analytics projects, big or small. And that will continue to be so in the foreseeable future,” Pineda said.