Insights & perspectives
Field notes from our engineering and delivery teams on building secure, large-scale platforms for Philippine government and enterprise organizations. Written from projects we have delivered, not from a content calendar.
Articles
Designing citizen identity platforms for Philippine LGUs
A citizen identity platform is not a card-printing project. It is a register, a verification service and a set of decisions about who is allowed to see what — and the card is the least interesting part.
Read articleBuilding secure government information systems
Security in a government system is mostly a set of unglamorous decisions made early: who can see what, what gets logged, and what happens to the test accounts before handover.
Read articleCloud disaster recovery for government applications
Disaster recovery is a pair of numbers you agree before you design anything. Most DR plans fail because nobody chose the numbers, or because the restore was never tested.
Read articleModernising legislative information management
A legislative system has one job that matters above the rest: to be able to say, without ambiguity, what the current text of a measure is and how it got there.
Read articleDesigning enterprise and government asset management systems
Asset registers fail for a predictable reason: the data model is built for the accountant and the data entry is done by the custodian, and nobody reconciled the two.
Read articlePublic-sector command center architecture
A command center is a network project with a room attached. Most of the ones that underperform were procured as a room with a video wall.
Read articleHow an LGU procures a software system under RA 9184
Most of what decides whether a government software project succeeds is settled before a single bid is opened. This is what belongs in the terms of reference, and what happens when it is left out.
Read articleBuild versus buy for an LGU permit system
Both answers are correct in different circumstances, and the decision is usually argued on the wrong criteria. Here is what actually separates the two cases, and the middle path most LGUs should consider.
Read articleHave a topic you'd like us to cover?
We write about the problems we actually hit on delivery. If there is something you are wrestling with, tell us and we may write it up.