The Philippines set up a national programme to modernise procedures within the administrations at the beginning of the 2000s. This programme was gradually extended to local authorities.

The municipalities of Caloocan, Muntinlupa, Antipolo and Tagaytay, for example, implemented strategies to modernise procedures within their administrations within the scope of the Government Information Systems Plan (GISP) approved and adopted as a framework for all the computerisation efforts of key services and operations.

None of these municipalities had Internet access for all their departments in 2010, and Caloocan had no Internet access at all. The municipal authorities nonetheless devoted resources to introducing this programme, for example at Tagaytay and Muntinlupa, where a job position was created specially. This measure was to be implemented by Caloocan and Antipolo.

In addition, the municipalities rallied technical assistance to improve the skills of their departments: Caloocan and Muntinlupa have a dedicated department, Management Information Systems; which acts as preferential contact; Antipolo preferred to consult its software vendor, Amellar Corporation; Agaytay enlisted the services of private technicians.

At Muntinlupa, emphasis was placed on e-governance, improving the website as a priority. The three other cities preferred to set themselves the goal of improving e-government by developing specific administrative applications on the Internet, requiring user identification.

http://workspace.unpan.org/sites/Internet/Documents/UNPAN035000.pdf

Lessons learnt

• The intermediate sized Philippines municipalities took charge of their digital transformation starting from a very low level of maturity.
• The implementation of a national policy framework allowed the municipalities to develop coherent procedures, as well as peer-learning Peer-learning Learning between peers, in this instance between local authorities. .