Articles, essays, and talks of Rey Lugtu

The Green Valley College Foundation, Inc., is one the fastest growing educational and training institution based in the City of Koronadal, South Cotabato. One of our major milestones for this year is to bring to our region the 1st Mindanao Technology Summit 2009. The summit will be a gathering of students, instructors/professors, IT professionals and businessmen with interests in the field of IT and IT enabled services. It will be held at the South Cotabato Gymnasium and Cultural Center, City of Koronadal, South Cotabato on November 21, 2009. Organized by our institution in partnership with a multinational company, International Business Machine (IBM), it shall center on the theme “ICT and Beyond.” The radical developments in the field of ICT opened up emerging business and career opportunities for Filipinos. Awareness of these opportunities will make us more responsive to the challenging times. Keynote speaker is Mr. Reynaldo Lugtu Jr, who will speak on the future of IT and II career...

(Published in Manila Standard Today under the Greenlight column, November 2, 2009) As I write this, I am in a classroom in INSEAD Singapore, attending a two-week executive education on business and management. Coincidentally, it’s also my birthday today, October 29, and I’m away from my family. My teenage daughters, Frances and Renee, had asked why I would sacrifice a birthday celebration with them, and instead go back to school. In an apologetic way, my cursory answer was that the schedule was fixed beforehand; but what I told them with great pride was that it’s an invaluable opportunity to learn from the fourth-ranking business school in the world. I went on in saying that the most important personal asset in your life is your education; that you should never stop learning. As a Chinese proverb goes, “learning is a treasure that will follow its owner everywhere.” Indeed, as an adult learner, I am one of those business executives who are sent by their companies to business school and...

(Published in Business Mirror under the Mirror Image column, October 20, 2009) All of us, in one way or another, have been affected by the super-typhoons Ondoy and Pepeng. But in the televised news reports that I’ve watched, it never failed to amaze me that Filipinos could still laugh and smile while being interviewed by news reporters in front of their wrecked homes. Even American soldiers on a rescue mission seemed to be wondering why affected Filipinos were all smiling, giving them “high-fives,” amid the catastrophe. If you think about it, there is a truism in the proverbial mababaw ang kaligayahan (literally translated “shallow happiness” or “easy to please”). To many of us Filipinos, happiness is watching Wowowee and reveling in the antics of Willie Revillame and his bevy of curvaceous dancers. Happiness is patiently lining up in a lotto outlet, waiting for one’s turn to get hold of a ticket to one’s dreams. Happiness is treating one’s family to a weekend lunch, spending a hard-ea...

(Published in Manila Standard Today under the Greenlight column, Spetember 7, 2009) Major business and market trends are spurring the growth of cloud computing among companies and governments, even as this newly emerging IT concept is still being refined. Cloud computing is an approach to a shared IT infrastructure in which large pools of computer systems are linked together to provide IT services. Cloud computing accesses "virtual" resources, and therefore, is not limited by the power and capabilities of local or remote computers. It is the next generation of enterprise data centers, which operate like the Internet, providing extreme scale and fast access to networked users. Cloud computing offers a simplified, centralized platform for use when needed, lowering costs and energy use. Unlike grid computing, which distributes IT for a specific task, cloud computing is used across an entire range of activities. The platforms can be externally hosted services, but are also used i...

(Published in Business Mirror under the Mirror Image column, Aug 18, 2009) NOTHING, you’d think, would be more dynamic or up-to-the-minute than how we buy and sell. From the early Greek agoras to the modern superstore, markets have always been the most sensitive barometers of economic and societal change. However, today’s retail model is struggling. It’s still largely a system built for the realities of an earlier era—a linear, push-based process where products are manufactured in isolation and put into market en masse from factory to truck to store, for customers who do the majority of their shopping in suburban malls. This served very well the needs of manufacturers, retailers and consumers half a century ago. But today, this system is straining to adapt to global supply chains, new ways and venues for selling—both physical and virtual—and a very different kind of consumer. Global retail today sees lead times as long as six to 10 months, forcing vendors to make significant bets on in...

De LaSalle University and the Business Processing Association of the Philippines (BPA/P) recently launched two leadreship and management programs for BPO employees to address the management skills gap among BPO supervisors and managers. The programs are starting in September 2009. The programs are: Enhancing Your Supervisory Skills (Supervisory Skills Program) Recommended for: Supervisors / Team Leads in BPO companies Course description This five-day course will give you an overview of the competencies that a supervisor in a BPO company must possess to succeed in his / her task of helping the people working under him / her to achieve their full potentials. Through various participative learning approaches, you will be able to enhance your ability to inspire others, to communicate well, to assess performance, and to effectively handle work-related problems, among others. Course content 1. The Role of the Supervisor in the Organization 2. Key Supervisory Skills 3. The Adapt-able Super...

(Published in Business World under the View from Taft column, June 18, 2009) Amid the mixed forecasts on the global economic rebound, experts on the outsourcing and offshoring industry are consistently painting a rosy picture toward the end of the year. According to the 2009 edition of the Black Book of Outsourcing, more than half of companies polled say they expect their spending on outsourcing services to come back and return to pre-recession levels. Similarly, a Business Processing Association of the Philippine (BPA/P) survey among industry players showed that 96% of respondents representing organizations that provide non-voice Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) services believe that 2009 prospects for their organizations are good, excellent, or outstanding. More than half of the respondents, 51%, said prospects are excellent. All these forecasts bode well for the local industry, but more likely than not, the industry will never be the same after the global slump that we are experie...

(Published in Manila Standard Today under the Greenlight column, June 8, 2009) The problems with our health care system are well-known and well-documented- and endlessly debated. What’s not so apparent is that many of them arise because the system isn’t, in fact, a system. Connecting the system Rising costs, limited access, high error rates, lack of coverage, poor response to chronic disease and the lengthy development cycle for new medicines- most of these could be improved if we could link diagnosis to drug discovery to health care are providers to insurers to employers to patients and communities. Today, these components, processes and participants that compromise the vast health care system aren’t connected. Duplication and hand offs are rampant. Deep wells of life-saving information are inaccessible. Take for instance, in 2005, the Health Education Reform Order (HERO) reported that the total health care expenditure in the Philippines amounted to P165 billion, or about 3.5 percent ...

(Published in Business Mirror under the Mirror Image column, June 3, 2009) Traffic congestion is choking the air and economies of cities everywhere. Worldwide, cities are wrestling with the environmental, economic and social impact of increasing urban congestion, resulting from too many vehicles on roads built during the last century and demand simply exceeding capacity. According to the US Department of Transportation, traffic congestion costs the United States $200 billion annually. Not only is this a huge waste of money, the Texas Transportation Institute reported that it also contributes to a loss of 7 billion hours stalled in traffic and $2.3 billion gallons of wasted fuel per year. In the Philippines there are 3,000 passenger buses making a total 32,000 trips that go along Edsa daily, according to the Metro Manila Development Authority (MMDA). An average bus can accommodate 60 people. Occupancy rate of these buses is only 66 percent per vehicle. This means that on the average...

(Published in Business Mirror under the Mirror Image column, May 12, 2009) What’s the sound of a planet talking? A century ago, the answer was simple: people conversing in person or over wired networks. Today it’s not just everyone, but also every thing talking to every other thing, in constant motion. An estimated 2 billion people will be on the Web by 2011—and they’ll be doing more than talking. Video on demand, IP or Internet television and Internet TV will account for nearly 90 percent of consumer Internet traffic by 2012. When people talk, it will be to many more people—via social-networking sites, whose memberships will top 500 million in the next three years. Consider that 10,000 security cameras in London are connected to the Web, feeding it video 24 hours a day. Or take the 300 connected sensors on a bridge in Minnesota; add the 800 monitoring another in Hong Kong—and multiply by the millions of roads, bridges and buildings in cities around the world. Now add billions of intel...

(Published in Manila Standard Today under the Greenlight column, Feb 23, 2009) For most of the last century, the world’s electrical grids stood as an engineering marvel of the modern age and a global symbol of progress. The cheap, abundant power they brought changed the way the world worked — filling homes, streets, businesses, towns and cities with energy. But today’s electrical grids reflect a time when energy was cheap, their impact on the natural environment wasn’t a priority and consumers weren’t even part of the equation. Back then, the power system could be centralized, closely managed and supplied by a relatively small number of large power plants. It was designed to distribute power in one direction only — not to manage a dynamic global network of energy supply and demand. As a result of inefficiencies in this system, the world’s grids are now incredibly wasteful. With little or no intelligence to balance loads or monitor power flows, they lose enough electricity annually to p...

(Published in The Manila Times under the Managing for Society column, January 27, 2009) When Ramalingam Raju, chairman and CEO of India’s fourth largest outsourcing vendor, Satyam Computer Services, admitted on January 7, 2009, that he had illegally boosted the company’s earnings numbers and created a fictitious cash balance of more than $1 billion, the corporate world was shocked by the weak, if not the lack of corporate governance in one of India’s most admired firms. Like a prognostication coming true, the World Bank banned Satyam in 2008 from participating in its procurement contracts for eight years, when it discovered Satyam employees had accessed sensitive information in its database. In 2003, Satyam won a lucrative five-year “sole source” contract to design, write and maintain all of the World Bank’s information systems. The contract, which began at $10 million, had grown to over $100 million by 2007. In 2008, the contract was not renewed. The Indian corporate governance crisis...