Ibpap charts ‘ambitious’ six-year plan

THE Information Technology and Business Process Association of the Philippines (Ibpap) is eyeing a million new information-technology and business-process management (IT-BPM) jobs in the mid- to high-complex services in six years, as the evolution of technology in the sector is taking away the demand from so-called simple-voice services.

Benedict C. Hernandez, chairman of Ibpap’s executive committee, said this is more of an “ambition” than a target under the industry’s new six-year road map until 2022.

On top of the million skilled jobs, there is an expected three to four indirect jobs generated per direct job, totaling to 4 million to 5 million new jobs.

The key in adding another million direct employees—at half the time—to the IT-BPM sector is human-capital development, Hernandez said.
“Let’s create, for the next six years, another million direct new jobs that are the more complex type of work. We crossed the million mark recently [and] it took us almost 15 years, from 2010 to 2015 to reach the million work force, but we’d like to be a little more ambitious. Let’s go for another million for the next six years. That’s our ambition,” Hernandez added in an interview with reporters
The scaling up of “professional capability” for Filipino business-processing outsourcing workers will be pivotal in attaining this employment ambition, as skills training should be redirected toward new areas for growth, such as data analytics, finance and accounting services, and engineering services.

These mid- to high-complex areas in IT is where the future opportunity lies and enjoy much higher growth rates, as digitization across industries creates demand for new nonvoice services.

The industry has already seen a gradual decline of simple, voice services to the over-all share of IT-BPM services, and this will likely continue with technology phasing out simple, routinary services.

Knowledge-based processing services, like health-care information, are also gaining ground. “The easier-to-do transaction work in contact-center area will be made efficient through automation, that will be the case. We’ve been evolving, as seen by the fact that there’s very few simply data-entry work and directory assistance [in the contact-center area] being done today, and we continue to anticipate that,” Hernandez added. In terms of revenue targets and growth rates, Ibpap is keeping mum on its projections until the road map is unveiled in October at the annual IT-BPM summit.

However, Nitin Bhat, senior partner at Frost and Sullivan, the consultancy firm crafting the road map with Ibpap, said the country continues to grow at twice the rate of the global compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of outsourced IT-BPM services of 6 percent. “With a 6-percent CAGR, total global opportunity for outsourced IT-BPM work is expected to grow from $166 billion to $250 billion by 2022,” Bhat said in a news statement. The local IT-BPM industry is eyeing $25 billion in revenue by 2016, and 1.3 million workers.

In Photo: Benedict Hernandez (left), chairman of the Executive Committee of the Information Technology and Business Process Association of the Philippines (Ibpap), joins Danilo Sebastian L. Reyes (center), chairman of Ibpap; and Information and Communications Technology Secretary Rodolfo A. Salalima, at the Ibpap Accelerate Philippine media launch on Monday, with the theme “A Comprehensive Overview of the Philippine IT-BPM Roadmap 2022,” in a Makati City hotel.

Source: http://goo.gl/FcvhXo