THE CITY of Tayabas expects faster gathering of the records of its residents with the implementation of the Integrated Barangay Civil Registration and Information System (iBCRIS), which provides analytical reports that can be used for decision making.

iBCRIS is a local civil registration system that assists with demographic surveys inside barangays, serves as a centralized storage, and lessens errors.

“In 2022, they did a survey in January and after half of the year, the encoding was not yet finished. But with iBCRIS, they can encode it on the tablet itself. They took a month before — now it could take only a week,” iBCRIS Project Leader Raymond S. Bermudez told BusinessWorld on July 17.

The process of surveys conducted by the Tayabas City Civil Registrar’s Office would be long, “but the encoding and generating of the report will be instant,” said Mr. Bermudez, who is also the Tayabas Office of the City Mayor’s ICT Section head.

Mr. Bermudez said the server will automate the previously paper-based surveys for the city’s 112,000 population from 66 barangays, which were manually encoded via Excel.

Tayabas City Civil Registrar Maide O. Jader said the aggregated data will help the government in planning new programs and create comparative figures to track migration trends between barangays.

“What is their purpose? Why are they moving to that barangay? Is there a problem with the service of health, education, or infrastructure?” she said.

Ms. Jader added that the system is expected to ease the burden on barangay secretaries in terms of logging information and the process of computing the requested data.

During the celebration of Tayabas’ 17th Cityhood Anniversary last week, Mayor Lovely Reynoso-Pontioso said the launch of iBCRIS supports Tayabas’ move towards becoming a smarter city.

The Department of Science and Technology-Philippine Council for Industry, Energy, and Emerging Technology Research and Development (DoST-PCIEERD) invested P996,000 in creating the iBCRIS under its Good Governance through Data Science and Decision Support System (GODDESS) program.

The GODDESS program has completed 20 projects with P35.764 million in total investments in different sectors, DoST-PCIEERD Chief Science Research Specialist Ruby Raterta said.

This program uses data science to address various national government agencies and local government units, academic or research institutions, and micro-, small, and medium enterprises.

DoST-PCIEERD Executive Director Enrico C. Paringit said this aligns with the agency’s Smart Cities Roadmap and vision of data-driven, information-based, and science-oriented governance among local governments. — Aubrey Rose A. Inosante

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