In June 2001, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo made history by becoming the first Chief Executive of the Philippine Republic to announce during her State of the Nation Address (SONA) over seventy (70) very specific, measurable, realistic and time-bound targets for the various sectors of her administration to achieve over the next few months and years.
The Presidential Management Staff (PMS) was called upon to establish and maintain an "always-on" secure Intranet-based system that would monitor and report to the President and her Cabinet on the most recent status of all the 70+ SONA directives issued by the President
Work was initiated in July 2001 on this SONA Targets Monitoring System with Microsoft Philippines and Softrigger Interactive as technology partner-volunteers. To facilitate the rapid creation of the Intranet web pages, Microsoft Front Page was utilized as the main webpage development tool.
This SONA Targets Monitoring System (STMIS) went live for its small target audience in early September 2001. In the interest of transparency, it was suggested by Sec. Garchitorena to the President that some relevant status information on each of the 70+ SONA be made available to the public as part of the Government Portal. This proposal was approved and rapidly put into effect.
It quickly became clear that the semi-manual tracking and publishing of the status updates on all of the 70+ SONA directives was very tedious and error-prone; a technology-based content management solution had to be implemented. In addition, the difficulty for the PMS IT organization was compounded with the incompatibility of content developed for the STMIS with the HTML standards used by the Government Portal, causing duplication of many steps in the content development/ approval/publication process.
There were two alternatives recommended to alleviate the problem: K2interactive proposed the acquisition of middleware solution that was estimated to cost P1million, while Microsoft Philippines offered the use of their Content Management Server solution on a pro-bono basis. Since there were no funds allocated to this project from the beginning, it was not a difficult decision to make to harmonize the technology platforms of both the Government Portal and the STMIS.
It was during the APEC Summit in Shanghai in October 2001 that the PMS Head at that time, Sec. Victoria P Garchitorena, and the general manager of Microsoft Philippines, Mr. Richard Francis, entered into formal agreements for a technology transfer and for the continuous development of the Government Portal and the STMIS utilizing appropriate Microsoft technologies on a pro-bono basis. The signing of these MOAs were witnessed by no less than President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates.
